James W. Calhoun
and the Nevada State Museum
Interviewee: James W. Calhoun
Interviewed: 1986
Published: 1987
Interviewer: R. T. King
UNOHP Catalog #138
Description
James W. Calhoun was born in Philipsburg, Montana, in 1903. His oral history outlines the development of the
Nevada State Museum, of which he was director from 1950 to 1973. The museum was founded in 1939, when the
Nevada legislature passed a bill allocating funds for the purchase of the old United States Carson City Mint building
from the federal government. It took two years to remodel and renovate the structure. On October 31, 1941, the
Nevada State Museum finally opened its doors to the public.
In 1948, its founder, Judge Clark J. Guild, and William Donovan, a museum board member, pushed to have a replica
of a mine built in the basement of the museum. Major Max C. Fleischmann agreed to finance the project with a
gift of $50,000.
In 1948 Director Tony Green hired Jim Calhoun to build display cases for a new gun room. He also had Calhoun
construct cages for animals in the children’s zoo, which was located alongside the museum. By April 1950, problems
over the construction of the mine and the development of the zoo led to the resignation of Tony Green. The board
of trustees asked Jim Calhoun if he could complete the mine with the money remaining and have the exhibit ready
by Nevada Day, 1950. Calhoun accepted the challenge, and the board appointed him supervisor, temporarily in
charge of the museum. By the next board meeting Jim Calhoun had made such progress that the board gave him the
go ahead to work on various other exhibits. The mine opened on schedule on October 31, 1950. Some six thousand
people went through the new exhibit that day.
Jim Calhoun was made full director of the museum in August 1951. It was a position he would hold for the next
twenty-two years. He was an active director, who did a little bit of everything. He constructed display cases,
designed exhibits, participated in archaeological digs, and roughed out plans for the Guild Annex, in addition to
his daily administrative duties. During his tenure the museum made great strides forward. Under his leadership,
the department of natural history in 1953, and the department of anthropology in 1959, came into existence. In the
1950s a mobile museum was created to tour the state’s school system. The Nevada State Museum was one of the first
state museums to initiate a mobile unit program. Under Calhoun’s direction the museum’s focus changed from that
of an institution interested only in displaying historic relics to one interested in research and in educating the public.
Calhoun discusses his working relationship with Judge Guild: Guild handled political affairs and fundraising, and
Calhoun took care of museum operations. Under Calhoun’s direction the museum gained national recognition. In
1972, it was accredited by the prestigious American Association of museums, officially establishing it as a professional
institution of the highest quality. The board of trustees honored Jim Calhoun for his loyalty, hard work and devotion
to the museum by naming the new wing the James W. Calhoun Annex.
(Continued on next page.)
Description (continued)
When Calhoun retired in 1973, Governor Mike O’Callaghan made a special visit to the museum to pay his personal
respects. The governor praised Calhoun for his personal role in the development of the museum.
The legacy of Jim Calhoun is still present today at the museum. The mine is considered the best exhibit in the museum
and one of the finest of its kind in the nation. Many of the displays that Jim Calhoun had a hand in planning are
still an important part of the museum: the bird and mammal galleries, the paleontology gallery, the Indian camp
scene and the history gallery. The museum owes a great deal to this man.
James W. Calhoun
and the Nevada State Museum
James W. Calhoun
and the Nevada State Museum
Made possible by a grant from the
Nevada Department of Museums and History
An Oral History Conducted by R.T. King
Edited by R.T. King
University of Nevada Oral History Program
Copyright 1987
University of Nevada Oral History Program
Mail Stop 0324
Reno, Nevada 89557
unohp@unr.edu
http://www.unr.edu/oralhistory
All rights reserved. Published 1987.
Printed in the United States of America
Publication Staff:
Director: R.T. King
Program Coordinators: Cynthia Bassett Shelley Chase
Text Production: Linda Sommer, Kay Stone
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publication, or to use any photos found within the transcripts, should be addressed
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Original recordings of most UNOHP interviews are available for research purposes
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Contents
Preface to the Digital Edition
ix
Original Preface
xi
Introduction
xiii
1. Growing Up in a Montana Mining Town
1
2. Adventures Above and Below the Ground
11
3. Marriage, Family and the Decision to Move to Nevada
19
4. Virginia City, 1943-1945
27
5. Settling in Carson City
33
6. Building the Mine Exhibit and Becoming Museum Director
41
7. The Development of Research and Teaching Missions
Winnemucca Lake Caves
An Emerging Operational Philosophy
The Mobile Museum
Recruiting Benefactors
Collecting Nevada Wildlife Specimens
Excavations at Lost City
53
viii
James W. Calhoun
Establishing the Archaeology Department
Space Shortages and the Guild Annex
Falcon Hill, Lahontan Lake Levels and a Severe Injury
The Tule Springs Dig
Finance and Staffing Problems
Pot Hunters at Pyramid Lake
8. Building a Core of Exhibits
Collection and Exhibit Policies and the Historical Room
Dat-so-la-lee Baskets
The V & T Room
The Gun Room
The Mammal and Bird Rooms
The Paleontology Room
A Memorial to Senator McCarran
Coin Press No. 5 and the Mint Room
The State Seal and a Moon Rock
U.S.S. Nevada Silver
An Indian Encampment
73
9. Expansion and Consolidation, 1962-1972
Vandalism
Efforts in Las Vegas
Renewed Space Shortages and the Calhoun Annex
An Expanding Educational Mission
No Support From Casinos
Acquiring V & T Rolling Stock
AAM Accreditation
83
10. Judge Guild, Major Fleischmann, and Other Trustees and Staff
Clark J. Guild
Max C. Fleischmann
Some Influential Trustees
Memories of a Few of the Staff
91
11. The Decision to Retire and a Succession of Directors
107
Photographs
113
Appendix: The Truman-Orr Foundation
117
Original Index: For Reference Only
119
Preface to the Digital Edition
Established in 1964, the University of
Nevada Oral History Program (UNOHP)
explores the remembered past through
rigorous oral history interviewing, creating a
record for present and future researchers. The
program’s collection of primary source oral
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about significant events, people, places,
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The UNOHP wishes to make the
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While taking great pains not to alter
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“uhs,” “ahs,” and other noises with which
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We can state, however, that the transcripts
accurately reflect the oral history recordings
on which they were based. Accordingly, each
transcript should be approached with the
x
James W. Calhoun
same prudence that the intelligent reader
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remembrance or opinions of the individuals
who were interviewed, and not the opinions
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In order to standardize the design of all
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most have been reformatted, a process that
was completed in 2012. This document may
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the UNOHP has made each transcript fully
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For more information on the UNOHP
or any of its publications, please contact the
University of Nevada Oral History Program at
Mail Stop 0324, University of Nevada, Reno,
NV, 89557-0324 or by calling 775/784-6932.
Alicia Barber
Director, UNOHP
July 2012
Original Preface
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reader exercises when consulting government
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It is the policy of the OHP to produce
transcripts that are as close to verbatim as
possible, but some alteration of the text is
generally both unavoidable and desirable.
When human speech is captured in print the
result can be a morass of tangled syntax, false
starts and incomplete sentences, sometimes
verging on incoherency. The type font contains
no symbols for the physical gestures and the
diverse vocal modulations that are integral
parts of communication through speech.
Experience shows that totally verbatim
transcripts are often largely unreadable and
therefore a waste of the resources expended
in their production. While keeping alterations
to a minimum the OHP will, in preparing a
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and the uhs, ahs and other noises with which
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b. occasionally compress language that
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c. rarely shift a portion of a transcript to
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xii
James W. Calhoun
but have been added to render the text
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There will be readers who prefer to take
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the minimal editing that occurred in the
production of this text; they are directed to
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Copies of all or part of this work and the
tape recording from which it is derived are
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The University of Nevada
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Introduction
In 1989 the Nevada State Museum
will celebrate its fiftieth anniversary. It is
important for cultural institutions to gather
and preserve their history. Toward this
purpose the board of trustees for the Nevada
Department of Museums and History voted
to fund 2 oral histories. The oral history of
James W. Calhoun, director of the Nevada
State Museum from 1950-1973, was chosen
to initiate this project with the Oral History
Program of the University of Nevada Reno.
This oral history has added greatly to our
knowledge of the development of the Nevada
State Museum.
The museum was founded in 1939, when
the Nevada legislature passed a bill allotting
funds for the purchase of the old United States
Carson City Mint building from the federal
government. It took 2 years to remodel and
renovate the structure. On October 31, 1941,
the Nevada State Museum finally opened its
doors to the public.
In 1948, its founder Judge Clark 3. Guild
and William Donovan, a museum board
member, pushed to have a replica of a mine
built in the basement of the museum.Major
Max C. Fleischmann agreed to finance the
project with a gift of $50,000.
In 1948 Director Tony Green hired Jim
Calhoun to build display cases for a new
gun room. He also had Jim construct cages
for animals in the children’s zoo, which was
located alongside the museum. By April
1950, problems over the construction of the
mine and the development of the zoo led to
the resignation of Tony Green. The board
of trustees asked Jim Calhoun if he could
complete the mine with the money remaining
and have the exhibit ready by Nevada Day,
1950. Jim accepted the challenge, and the
board appointed him supervisor, temporarily
in charge of the museum. By the next board
meeting Jim had made such progress that
the board gave him the go ahead to work on
various other exhibits. The mine opened on
schedule on October 31, 1950. Some 6,000
people went through the new exhibit that day.
Jim Calhoun was made full director
of the museum in August 1951. It was a
position he would hold for the next 22 years.
xiv
James W. Calhoun
Jim was an active director, who did a little
bit of everything. He constructed display
cases, designed exhibits, participated in
archaeological digs, and roughed out plans
for the Guild Annex, in addition to his daily
administrative duties. It was during his
tenure that the museum made such great
strides forward. Under his leadership the
department of natural history in 1953, and
the department of anthropology in 1959
came into existence. In the 1950s a mobile
museum was created to tour the state’s school
system. The Nevada State Museum was one
of the first state museums to initiate a mobile
unit program. Under Calhoun’s direction the
museum’s focus changed from an institution
interested only in displaying historic relics to
one interested in research and in educating
the public. This oral history also provides
insight into how Judge Clark 3. Guild, the
museum’s founder and long-time chairman
of the board of trustees, established a solid
working relationship with Calhoun, with
Guild handling fund raising and political
affairs, while Jim took care of the functional
operations of the museum. Both men had a
vision of what the museum should be, and
these blended to give us what it is today. The
team stayed intact until the death of the judge
in 1971.
Under Calhoun’s direction the museum
gained national recognition. In 1972, the
Nevada State Museum was accredited by
the prestigious American Association of
Museums, an act officially establishing it
as a professional institution of the highest
quality. Prior to his retirement, the board of
trustees honored Jim Calhoun for his loyalty,
hard work and devotion to the museum
by naming the new wing the James W.
Calhoun Annex. When he retired in 1973,
the governor of Nevada, Mike O’Callaghan,
made a special visit to the museum to pay
his personal respects. Governor O’Callaghan
praised Calhoun for “his personal role in
the development of this fine institution,”
and remarked that few employees of the
state of Nevada can look back on as full and
rewarding a career as yours has been.”
Some 14 years after his retirement the
legacy of Jim Calhoun is still present today
at the museum. The mine is still considered
the best exhibit in the museum and one of
the finest of its kind in the nation. Many of
the displays that Jim Calhoun had a hand
in planning are still an important part of
the museum. These include the bird and
mammals galleries, the paleontology gallery,
the Indian camp scene and the history gallery.
The museum owes a great debt to this man,
and this oral history is an opportunity to note
for the historical record the accomplishments
of James W. Calhoun.
Robert A. Nylen
Acquisitions Registrar
Nevada State Museum
April 7, 1987
James
JAMES W.
W.Calhoun
CALHOUN
1970
1970
1
Growing Up in a
Montana Mining Town
James W. Calhoun: I was born in
Philipsburg, Montana on November 6, 1903.
My mother’s maiden name was Margaret
Hickey and my father was William B.
Calhoun. His father had come from Salt
Lake City to Marysville, Montana and run
a freighting outfit. My mother was born in
Philipsburg, but why Dad came there, I don’t
know.
My father’s mother, Sara Powell, had
come over from Wales and landed in New
York before there was an Ellis Island. She
came across the plains in a covered wagon
to Salt Lake. I think her family had been
converted to Mormonism in Wales. And
my grandfather came from Scotland over to
Canada, then down to New York and over
to Salt Lake. He had a store in Salt Lake
City. Granny claimed that she was slated for
Brigham Young’s Bee Hive and didn’t want
that. But I don’t know whether that was why
they left Salt Lake, or because James Calhoun
was not a Mormon and didn’t get any trade in
his store. They went by wagon to Marysville,
Montana, where a big gold boom was on,
and he started up a freighting outfit there
and run that. I suppose that they moved to
Philipsburg on account of the big mines and
mills running up at Granite.
My mother’s mother was married to a
Williams. They came across in a covered
wagon and stopped in Gold Hill, Nevada for
a little bit and then went on to Philipsburg,
Montana. You see, the big silver mines at
Granite—which is 4 miles from Philipsburg,
up in the hills—were running at the same
time as this Comstock up here. So there was
lots of people went up there. Anyway, I don’t
know what happened to Williams. I guess he
died, and my grandmother married James
Hickey then. That’s when my mother and her
3 brothers were born in Philipsburg.
R. T. King: I would like you to think back and
tell me the things you remember most about
your mother and father.
Well, my father wasn’t a very tall fellow,
but a very good worker and real ambitious.
I imagine he graduated from high school,
2
James W. Calhoun
but I’m not sure. He didn’t go to college; I’m
pretty sure of that. He was probably kind of
adventurous, because during the SpanishAmerican War he rode a horse 80 miles to
Missoula to enlist. Uncle John claimed he
almost killed the horse getting there, because
the train was coming through from the coast
and he had to make it. He went to Georgia
and trained there.
My father earned his living as a mill
electrician first. He took a correspondence
course in electricity, and was an electrician
at the Bi-Metallic mill. Later he worked at
a grocery store, where he took orders in the
morning and delivered in the afternoon. He
got to know lots of people, eventually ran for
office as a Republican, was elected clerk of the
district court and held the job for 12 years.
And then after that, in the middle 1920s, they
went to Seattle and bought a grocery store
there and run that.
he had cancer. I’m not sure. He had to go to
the veterans hospital in Seattle, and he died
there in 1948.
Why would your mother and father have left
Philipsburg?
Well, she was a typical Irish girl, I guess...
black hair. She was a housewife for years. And
then when Dad got to be clerk of the court,
for a while there toward the last term of his
clerk of the court deal, I think she worked at
the courthouse as his secretary. And then,
of course, she learned the grocery business
after they got to Seattle—managed that. I
never did find out for sure how far she went
in school, but she must have had a high school
education. She was competent enough in
arithmetic and everything like that.
Well, there just wasn’t much more there.
Philipsburg was one of those up and down
mining towns, you know—boom and bust.
Of course, things were pretty slow there—no
mines running [in the 1920s]. There wasn’t
much to do there, and they decided to try
their hand at the grocery business because he
had worked in it. So they went to Seattle and
bought this little family grocery store, out in
the west end of Seattle, I think it was.
With his clerk of the court experience,
my father worked down at the courthouse
in Seattle doing research for title companies
and so forth, where they give you a title
search when you buy property and things
like that. He worked there for a long time—
all the time until he finally got sick. I think
If your father worked in the courthouse
researching titles for real estate companies,
that must have meant that your mother ran
the store.
Pretty much so, yes. He took it in the
evenings, and Saturday and Sunday he worked
there. Mother, I guess, run it pretty much.
They had quite a time through the Depression,
I know, people wanting credit, and they gave
lots of credit. It was pretty hard on them
carrying people. [laughter] Once they even
took in a slot machine as payment; they had
it in the bedroom. But they made out all right
on it.
What was your mother like?
Within most families one of the partners is
dominant. [laughter] They know it, usually,
and everybody in the family knows it as well.
Looking back on the relationship between your
mother and father, which one of them would
you say had been the strongest personality in
the family?
Growing Up in a Montana Mining Town
Well, I don’t know. Dad was at first, but
toward the later years I would say Mother was.
I think the change from Philipsburg was
established by Mother. She wanted to leave
there, because there really wasn’t much there
for her with kids...anything. I had one sister,
a year and a half younger than me, and she
went with them to Seattle. We had some
close friends there by the name of Knatz that
had moved down there, and with Mother
corresponding with Mrs. Knatz all the time....
well, I think that was one of the things that
persuaded them to go to Seattle.
You went to high school in Philipsburg?
Yes. I went through the 12 grades—
graduated from high school in 1921.
Were there any teachers you had who had a
strong influence over either your education or
what you hoped to be when you grew up?
No, not particularly. The English teacher
had trouble with me because I wasn’t too
interested in all that breaking down sentences
and so forth! The Latin teacher had trouble
with me because I’d take my books home
at night and lay them on Mother’s sewing
machine and pick up them in the morning.
I didn’t do too well in Latin. I was kind of
interested in physics, chemistry and the
manual training courses in the shops there,
of course. But my school deal was not too
outstanding. [laughter]
I think I just squeaked by mostly in all
of my courses. [laughter] The only one that I
had any trouble with was in manual training
once, and that was only a half-year deal. I
was trying to make a piano bench and had
a wide piece of pine about 16 inches wide, I
think, and I was trying to plane that to get it
3
smooth. I planed and planed and planed till
the board was getting quite thin [laughter]
and couldn’t get it smooth. So he flunked me
on that semester!
You later went on to become very handy,
though, didn’t you?
Oh, yes. I didn’t have any trouble after I
got out working; everything seemed to come
pretty easy on anything to do with my hands.
In fact, I never did get fired from any job, even
though I didn’t know anything about it when
I’d go 6 to work on it. Somebody’d help me out
on it and I’d learn it and get by all right.
Did you belong to any clubs in school?
No. I don’t remember any clubs much; I
don’t remember if we had any clubs much in
school there. About the only big events was
the junior prom and graduation, and they
didn’t have any big ceremonies for graduating
from grade school or anything like they do
nowadays.
What sort of reading did you do outside of the
school work that was assigned to you? Can you
recall any favorite books or types of reading
that you did?
Yes, Zane Grey. [laughter] I don’t
particularly remember anything else much.
Did Philipsburg have a newspaper?
Yes, the Philipsburg Mail.
Can you remember what sort of editorial views
the Philipsburg paper may have had?
No, I never did even read it very much.
4
James W. Calhoun
You were old enough, when the First World
War broke out to remember what your family’s
position may have been concerning that, Of
course, throughout the country there was a
great deal of division over whether the United
States should be in that war or not.
Oh, Philipsburg was real patriotic for
the First World War, had lots of volunteers—
young fellows from there. My uncle Ed
volunteered and went over to France;was in
the Medical Corps over there.He came back
all right. He got gassed once, I think, and had
trouble with that all the time. I remember
some of the younger miners being all “het
up” about the thing and getting after some
of the old Germans there that they thought
were supporting the Kaiser. And there was
considerable donations to the iron drives, you
know—gathering up iron and one thing and
another like that.
Were there many Germans living in the area?
Yes, there was quite a few Germans
and Italians, some Finns, some Austrians in
the mines. The immigrants come over and
worked in the mines a lot in those days, so
there was quite a few Germans there, but
none of them that were very adamant about
Germany or the Kaiser or anything like that.
I just remember that there was an incident
or two with somebody that they thought was
supporting the Kaiser. I don’t know whether
they really were or not, but....
Did your house have a library? Did your
mother and father have books?
Some but not to any great extent.
Did you have any other interests, such as art or
sports or anything like that? Music?
No. I’ve tried different things. Oh, when
we were young we used to go in a vacant area
down below our house and play kick-the-can
and a lot of games like that—hide-and-seek
and so forth. I did try out for basketball in
high school, but didn’t make it on that, so I
didn’t do any more about basketball. Most of
my interest, when I wasn’t in school, was with
horses and riding and one thing and another
when we got big enough. My uncles always
had the horses in the fields alongside our
house there—a 9-acre field where they put
the horses when they come from the ranch to
take them to the railroad and then vice versa.
My uncles in Philipsburg were my
mother’s brothers. Uncle Jim run the ranch
with his family. John wasn’t married, and John
did all the traveling to the big sales at Miles
City, Montana and Grand Island, Nebraska,
buying up horses and shipping them. He
would take them out to the ranch, run them
on the range, break some of them so they’d
be more valuable, and then bring them back
in, load them on the trains and take them to
these sales. And that’s where I usually spent
most of my summers when I was big enough
to kind of help with the chores. Then I led the
derrick horse, putting up wild hay and various
things like that until I was big enough to take
part in the riding and herding of the horses,
and finally, roundup from the range. See, they
had 6 sections of land under fence, and then
all the open range was outside of that that they
used, too.
I used to do quite a bit of fishing in
different times of the year, and then hunting.
I always went hunting deer in the fall. In those
days, a lot of people depended on deer for
winter meat; of course, you were only allowed
one buck. We used to go out, and there was a
ranch down Rock Creek where we could rent a
cabin and hunt. We’d stay out about a week or
so. We’d get what we could in the way of bucks
Growing Up in a Montana Mining Town
or dry does, hang them up back in the timber,
and then finally we’d make a midnight trip to
town and hang the deer in the various garages
and so forth. Then we’d go back out and hunt
for our legal buck, and then come in with the
bucks all strung over...the cars all had fenders
in those days, you know—running boards. So
we’d come in with our legal limit of deer, but
most everybody’d have at least 2 deer to start
out the winter with. Of course, when I
was on that Forest Service job, I used to fish
the lakes out in the mountains, and once in
a while take a grouse and supplement my
canned food. [laughter]
When you were hunting as a boy, who did you
go with?
I hunted with Dad a little bit for a while.
He wasn’t too much of a hunter, but he did
go a few times with me. And then after that
it was going with my friends all the time. We
did a lot of fishing at different times, and an
the wintertime we’d go up to Georgetown
Lake and cut holes and fish through the ice
and things like that.
How old were you when you got your first rifle?
I had .22s first, and I don’t know how old
I was then.
That’s usually a pretty big event in a boy’s life....
Yes. In those days they thought nothing
of the youngsters having guns. Everybody
learned how to use them, and I can’t remember
any accidents or anything much. And then
later when I was riding all the time, why, you
always carried a six-shooter with you—not
particularly for any protecting yourself or
anything, but there was always a chance that
your horse would break a leg, or something’d
5
happen and you’d have to shoot your horse.
It was just common practice to carry a sixshooter on you.
Can you remember anything about social life
that was available to teenagers or to kids in
Philipsburg?
Yes. There was a movie. I can remember
the first movies when they had a movie house
that was just plain benches with no backs
on them or anything. We just sat. The kids
would all go and watch these serials, all these
adventures. And they had some cartoons, of
course. It cost 5% to get in. Later there was
a big opera house in Philipsburg, where you
had good seats and a regular movie house.
And then, of course, there was a dance once
in a while in high school.
We used to ice skate. There was a pond
about a half mile from Philipsburg where
we used to ice skate a lot in the winter...sled
riding. See, Philipsburg is built on 2 sides of a
gulch, and the main street runs up the gulch.
So on one side of town we could bobsled down
one of the streets to the main street. They
used to have some big bobsleds that about 8
or 9 people could ride on. And then, Granite,
where the big silver mines were in the early
days, was about 4 miles from Philipsburg up
in the mountains on a winding road like the
one you would take to Virginia City from
here, you know, only much steeper. Sothey
used to go up to Granite with the bobsleds
and ride those bobsleds down that winding
road! It was quite a feat. The fellow doing the
steering on it had to be real good. The ones on
the back of the thing helped with the steering,
you know, and around the bends, why, they’re
putting their feet out and slowing it some, and
there was always a brake on them, too. One
guy run the brake that put a deal down to slow
you down. You’d only get one ride about in an
6
James W. Calhoun
evening, because it took a long time to get up
that 4 miles, you know; not too long coming
down, of course, but....
evening, because it took a long time to get up
that 4 miles, you know; not too long coming
down, of course, but....
Can you remember anything about social life
that was available to teenagers or to kids in
Philipsburg?
Did you and your family do any traveling
outside of Montana when you were young?
Yes. There was a movie. I can remember
the first movies when they had a movie house
that was just plain benches with no backs
on them or anything. We just sat. The kids
would all go and watch these serials, all these
adventures. And they had some cartoons, of
course. It cost 5% to get in. Later there was
a big opera house in Philipsburg, where you
had good seats and a regular movie house.
And then, of course, there was a dance once
in a while in high school.
We used to ice skate. There was a pond
about a half mile from Philipsburg where
we used to ice skate a lot in the winter...sled
riding. See, Philipsburg is built on 2 sides of a
gulch, and the main street runs up the gulch.
So on one side of town we could bobsled down
one of the streets to the main street. They
used to have some big bobsleds that about 8
or 9 people could ride on. And then, Granite,
where the big silver mines were in the early
days, was about 4 miles from Philipsburg up
in the mountains on a winding road like the
one you would take to Virginia City from
here, you know, only much steeper. Sothey
used to go up to Granite with the bobsleds
and ride those bobsleds down that winding
road! It was quite a feat. The fellow doing the
steering on it had to be real good. The ones on
the back of the thing helped with the steering,
you know, and around the bends, why, they’re
putting their feet out and slowing it some, and
there was always a brake on them, too. One
guy run the brake that put a deal down to slow
you down. You’d only get one ride about in an
Not outside of Montana. The only
traveling that I can remember of any distance
was to Helena, Montana, to the state fair once.
And otherwise, it was about 30 miles over
to Anaconda, where the judge of the district
lived. We went over there a time or two when
he had the family over to dinner.
In those days it was all gravel roads, you
know, or just dirt. And the tires weren’t very
good. Dad had the agency on the Metz car,
made in Germany, and he had a Metz. Going
over to Anaconda that 30 miles, we’d have 3
and 4 blowouts. We’d have to stop, take off
the tire and patch the tube and pump it up
by hand and put it back on again, and so
you didn’t make too many trips. This Metz
had what they called a disk drive—a big disk
wheel, and then a composition smaller one
that run against that. And the further out
you went on this, the faster you went, you
know. You moved this composition on out
on this metal big one, and the faster you
went, moving it out there. Well, every time
you took a trip like that.... Dad had a garage
with a big pit underneath that he could take
out the boards and get down under there. He
would take the whole thing apart and put in a
new composition wheel on there, because the
thing would get a flat spot on it and thumped
every time it’d go around! [laughter] So every
time you took a trip, you had to change that.
When we were talking earlier about what your
father did, you didn’t mention the Metz agency.
Let’s see...he was a mill electrician, he worked
for a grocery, and he was the county clerk, and
Growing Up in a Montana Mining Town
he also had a Metz agency. Was there anything
else he was involved in?
Well, he had a contract with the
telephone company. On his days off from the
courthouse—Saturday and Sunday— he’d
take me with him and we would go out the
south road from Philipsburg, out over the
mountains into Rock Creek Valley, up the
Rock Creek Valley to the east fork of Rock
Creek, and then back over in the north end of
Philipsburg. It would take us all day to make
the trip around there, and he’d stop at each one
of these farmhouses and check the telephone
and make any repairs if they needed them
and so forth. And he checked the lines, of
course, to all the way to.. .one reason he took
me along was because I could watch the lines.
We always went by horse and buggy. That was
before he had the Metz. I was probably 10 or
12—along there, I imagine—when he got the
Metz agency. Well, he was the agent for Metz
in Philipsburg, but it was just himself, you
know. He never did sell one that I know of.
From the reading I’ve done, it appears to me
that if one could afford an automobile—and
particularly something like a Metz—in the
years before the First World War, the family
was fairly prosperous.
Well, I don’t remember any hardships or
anything; they always seemed to be able to
buy presents for us kids and live well enough,
especially, I guess, after the clerk of the court
job. It probably paid pretty well in those days.
I never did pay much attention to it as a kid
growing up.
Of course, that’s a political position. Maybe we
could spend a couple of minutes talking about
politics now. Your father had enlisted in the
army as a cavalryman, I suppose?
7
Yes.
Was he an enlisted man or an officer?
Just enlisted. I think he was still in
training in Georgia when the war ended.
Of course, many families end up discussing
politics around the dinner table whether the
kids are interested or not. Can you recall any
such conversations in your house?
No, I can’t. All I know is that Dad was a
real fan of Teddy Roosevelt’s, and voted for
him all the time. That’s about all I can tell
you, because I wasn’t interested in politics
as a kid!
Do you remember if your mother ever had any
interest in politics?
No. She didn’t. I was about 9 years old
when my father first ran for clerk of the court.
Dad used to campaign the old-fashioned
way. He had a big jug of whiskey and a box
of cigars, and we’d take off in the horse and
buggy and go around and stop at all these
ranches. He’d talk to the people, and discuss
things and argue with them and give them a
drink or a cigar. It was just the men that voted
in those days, anyway, I guess. Dad was one
that liked to argue, so he’d get in discussions
with people and they would argue back and
forth. We took quite a few jaunts that way
campaigning, but they never did go in too
much for signs or anything like that. It was
always personal contact.
Can you recall any of the differences
between Republicans and Democrats in your
hometown?
No.
8
James W. Calhoun
You were probably much too young to pay
attention to that.
remember any great discussions or anything
about it.
Can you recall what sorts of discipline were
imposed upon you children by your parents?
Yes. I didn’t pay much attention to it.
There was quite a healthy women’s suffrage
movement underway at about that time. In
fact, there were some notable women’s suffrage
figures who operated here in the West. Did
anything ever occur in Philipsburg along those
lines, or did your mother ever express any
interest in getting the right to vote?
Not that I know of. I don’t remember
her ever saying anything about it or being
interested. She may have among her lady
friends, but I don’t know.
Did the family attend church regularly?
No, not particularly. Used to send us kids
to Sunday school regularly—Methodist. But
they never did attend themselves regularly.
Mother was a Catholic originally, but she got
discouraged with them someway, I don’t know,
and changed. And Dad never did profess very
much religious views or anything else. I don’t
ever remember him going to church. We went
to Sunday school. I never did go to church
after the Sunday school deal was over with,
though. They used to give us a nickel for the
collection; and I remember once I didn’t turn
in my nickel and bought some candy when I
got downtown, and I really caught it for that.
We weren’t very religious in any way.
What kind of attitudes did your parents have
toward such things as drinking and partying
and gambling and things like that?
Well, just neutral on it. They didn’t do any
drinking. Mother didn’t drink. Dad used to
have a beer once in a while, was all. But I don’t
About the only think I remember is
mother once was away someplace for the
night. Dad took the 2 of us kids to the picture
show. We got in a fight coming back up the hill
to the house, and he didn’t say a word until
we got home. He let us both get undressed,
and then he walloped us with a razor strop.
You know, he had a straight razor that they
used in those days. He gave us a walloping
with that and sent us to bed. That’s about the
only real one that I remember. He used to cut
my hair, too. He had me sitting on a box out
in the front yard once, cutting my hair, and
I wouldn’t sit still. So he grabbed me by the
shoulders and bounced me up and down on
the box. That’s about the only 2
Would you say that was because there were
very few rules to be kept, or because you were
generally just a pretty good kid? [laughter]
Well, both. I don’t think we got into very
much trouble. Didn’t seem to in those days.
Were there any social divisions in the
community? Was there such a thing as the
wrong side of the tracks? [laughter]
Oh, yes. On one side of the town was all
the bigger, nicer houses and the merchants.
We were kind of isolated on one part up there
with only a couple of houses. Butting up
against our fence my uncles had a field with a
great big barn on the other side of it. Then on
out of the south end of Philipsburg, and down
around the depot, was the poorer sections.
One section was practically all Italians and
Growing Up in a Montana Mining Town
a few Finlanders. They kept by themselves
pretty much. We were kind of isolated from
any of them as far as that goes, up where we
lived.
We lived in a house that Dad built pretty
much himself—a nice looking house. We have
some pictures around here someplace of it.
It had a kitchen, dining room, living room
and 2 bedrooms, wallpapered. Didn’t have
any sheetrock in those days, just the boards
and wallpaper on them with no insulation.
You had to keep the fires going pretty heavy
when it was 40 below zero weather. It had
inside plumbing for the bath and everything,
but the toilet was outside. You had to trek out
in the snowstorm to get to it. It had electricity,
and it was the old fashioned wiring where they
had the porcelain knobs and run the 2 wires
across on all the ceiling joists up in the attic.
Lightning hit there once. We were all away,
and we come home and there’s a streak clear
across the ceiling down the full length of the
house, and all these little pieces of wallpaper
scattered all over the floor where the lightning
had torn all those oft. But nobody was home
at the time.
Other than electric lights, what kind of electrical
appliances can you remember?
Didn’t have any. Well, we had a washing
machine that you hooked up with the cold
water faucet and turned on the water, and it
swished back and forth to wash the clothes.
Then you had a crank-turned wringer that
you put on the edge of the tub and wrung the
clothes by hand over into the rinse water, and
then changed the wringer onto the tub and
run it again to wring them out to hang them
on the clothesline.
We didn’t have any electric refrigerators
then. They used to put up ice ever year in a
warehouse downtown there— cover it with
9
sawdust, you know. And so you had blocks
of ice in the icebox all summer to keep things
cool. In the wintertime, of course, it was pretty
cool all the time. [laughter] You’d bring your
deer in and hang him on the north side of the
house, and it’d just be frozen solid and stay
that way all winter. When you wanted it, you
had to hack off a leg or whatever you wanted
to get off of the deer and bring it in and get it
thawed out to cut it up. For quite a while, until
later on when we got bigger, my sister and I
shared a room. Then we had a line of buildings
out there where the garage was and the toilet
and storage, and we built one room on the
end of that. I had a stove in there, and I used
that for my bedroom. One year before we built
that I stayed in a tent outside. I guess it was
just a tent built up on a platform, you know,
with the side boards around it. The dog and I
slept in there; the dog slept with me. That 40
below zero weather was pretty crimpy, but we
stayed warm with lots of blankets. But getting
up in the morning, it was grab the clothes and
run for the house as hard as you could go, and
dress in the kitchen! [chuckles) I was in high
school by then.
I suppose the main influence on me as
a youth was the ranch and the riding—the
cowboy part of it and all of that. That’s what I
did the most of in all those early years, every
chance I got. I was always the leader in things
because I had access to all these horses and
things. Lots of times when I went to the ranch,
I took another kid with me for a companion
on riding—various different ones, quite a
few different people. I suppose that probably
developed me into being self-sufficient and
kind of a leader and one thing and another. It
always seemed to happen through life all the
time to me. It always surprised me, because
about every place I ever went...why, I never
could understand it, but they always picked
me out to go ahead with things. Like when I
10
James W. Calhoun
went down to Marysville, California, to work
on a big army camp there after Roosevelt
closed the mines. I didn’t know anything
much about the carpenter work down there
like that—hadn’t done any of it. I just bought
a saw and a hammer and went down there
and got a job. I was only on it just a little while
when the foreman pulled me off and put me
over about 8 other fellows putting the forms
together for the concrete gang coming along,
to form the foundations and everything. I
didn’t know a thing about it, but these oldtimers there were people that did know. They
just said, “Well, you do this. You do that.” So
I just went ahead and was the boss on that
gang.
When I went up to Alaska working in a
sawmill, they put me on the cutoff saw, where
all these boards come out on a conveyer belt
and you have to run and sort them. Two
Mexicans and a Siwash Indian were working
on that. They just took me under their wing
and showed me how to do it, and everything
went fine.
Do you think this independence and ability
to take charge derives from the way you were
brought up?
Well, I think it must have been some,
because when you come around to it, I was
brought up with quite a rough bunch of
people. Those cowboys...I mean they were all
good fellows and everything, but they were
rough. They didn’t have too much sympathy.
They’d laugh at a kid, you know, and didn’t
care whether they hurt his feelings and
everything like that. You had to get pretty selfsufficient. I don’t know—people just seemed
to turn things over to me and figured that I
was going to do them. I never could figure
it out. I just went ahead and did the job. I
never did decide on what I wanted to be. The
folks wanted me to go to Butte to the school
of mines to take mining engineering. But, I
don’t know...I was reluctant, because I couldn’t
make up my mind and I didn’t want to use
their money. At that time and right after that
the local banks all closed and tied up their
money. I think they finally got 80 percent on
the dollar out of it.
2
Adventures Above and
Below the Ground
After graduating from high school
another kid, Logan Franklin, and I decided
we wanted to go to San Francisco. His brother
had gone down to San Francisco, and his
mother lived in Marysville, California. So we
rode freight trains down to San Francisco out
of Philipsburg. There was a railroad strike on
at that time, and the government had shotgun
guards on all the trains that carried the mail.
We couldn’t ride passenger trains at all, and
we couldn’t go into the railroad yards. It made
it kind of dangerous, getting off the freight
trains and on again. Some of those railroad
yards are real long, you know, so the trains
would be going quite fast when they came
out and went into the yards. We had to get off
of them before the train entered the yards; I
guess it was kind of dangerous, but it didn’t
mean much to us.
We stopped in Salt Lake City and had
to wait till the next morning for the train to
come out. We were in a vacant lot out of the
outskirts of Salt Lake, waiting for the train
to come through. There was a professional
hobo there with us—an old fellow—and
along toward morning he said, “Come on,
come on. Let’s get the heck out of here.” We
wanted to know why, and he pointed across
the street over to a house where there was a
truck backed up and they were moving all the
furniture out. And he said, “They’re robbing
that house, moving all the furniture out, and
when it gets reported the police are going to
be all around here looking for people. They’d
pick us up and throw us in the can.” So we had
to change positions on where we were going
to catch the train, and waited till it came out
and caught it all right out of there.
Crossing those deserts from Salt Lake in
October, it was real cold at night. I remember
once we found a great big sheet of wrapping
paper, real heavy stuff that they’d taken off of
crates or something, and we used that for a
blanket and cuddled up on the floor with that
over us to keep warm.
Did the train stop in Reno?
We didn’t get off there, just stopped
briefly. We stayed quiet in the boxcar with the
12
James W. Calhoun
door closed. They didn’t seem to search it or
anything there.
Was this the first time you had ever been in
Nevada?
Yes. I don’t remember very much of it,
because I didn’t see anything much, you know.
Most of the time we had the door closed on
the boxcar, keeping out of sight so the railroad
bulls [railroad police] wouldn’t find us and
kick us off.
We went over into Marysville and stopped
there with Login’s mother for a day or two.
Then we just bought tickets and went on into
San Francisco. I had an uncle there that was
working in the construction trade. I tried to
get into that, but there wasn’t any chance to
get into the union, and they wouldn’t give
you a job unless you belonged to the union.
So I tried working in several small factories
there, running rivet machines and making
lunch baskets and stuff like that. There wasn’t
very much pay in it and nothing that I wanted
to do at all, so after a few months I bought a
ticket and went home.
When you got home, did you continue working
for your uncles?
Well, I probably would have if things
had turned out different. But after World
War I the use of horses deteriorated. [During
World War I the U.S. government purchased
large numbers of mules and horses for
use in military service. Following the war
this market evaporated, and mechanized
equipment began replacing draft animals in
agriculture.—ed]
I never did care much for the cattle part of
it. My uncles didn’t have any cattle, in fact—
just a few milk cows for the ranch. But cattle
are always so slow and everything; horses, you
know, they’re always on the move. I wasn’t
interested in the cattle, much, or the sheep.
I don’t know what would have come of
it had we stayed around there, but my Uncle
John bought a mine after Jim died and after
the demand for horses fell off on account of
the farm machinery and trucks and things.
John and Jack Harrah and another brother
of John’s, Tom Hickey, bought the Moorlight
Mining Company, which was about a mile up
the gulches from Philipsburg. It mined high
grade dioxide manganese that they use in dry
cell batteries. It was one of the highest grade
dioxide manganese mines in the country, I
guess. Of course, it was easier to go to work
at the mine than anyplace else, and so I went
to work for them quite often.
They had unions there—a miners’ union,
you know. In fact, I was president of the Mine,
Mill and Smelters Union for a while there.
That was probably in the early 1930’s or late
1920s. Of course, I got in pretty bad with
our uncles that run the Moorlight Mining
Company for being president of the union.
I took it because I thought I could do some
good there, knowing the inside of it on the
company part quite a bit. Then the miners
were going to strike for higher wages, and
right at that time it wasn’t a very good time
to strike for higher wages on account of the
condition of the mining companies, which I
knew. I wanted to just try to get better working
conditions and have showers for the miners
and things like that rather than striking for
wages.
Well, we were going to have a meeting to
have a strike vote, and I persuaded quite a few
of the conservatives to attend that meeting.
Then when it came time for a vote, I called
the vice president up to the chair, and I went
down on the floor and made a speech to them
about conditions and one thing and another.
Then I went back up and called for the vote.
Adventures Above and Below the Ground
We bested the radicals and didn’t have the
strike for higher wages, but we didn’t gain very
much, either, on the working conditions.
As a Teddy Roosevelt Republican, how did your
father feel about your union activities?
Well, he was in Seattle at that time, so it
didn’t bother him any.[laughter]
Had he had anything to say about unions when
he was still living in Philipsburg?
Not that I remember, although he must
have belonged to the union when he was an
electrician at the Bi-Metallic mill, which was
a great big mill. It covered a quarter of an acre
or so. He had to have belonged to the union
then, but I didn’t know anything about it.
Although the ranch was not doing well,
Uncle John kept the land and kept dabbling
in the horses. After I graduated from high
school, he still had me riding for him quite
a bit off and on. He still had horses on the
range, and he had me handling the horses—
rounding up and bringing them back and
forth. Much of the time I would get another
high school kid or one just out of high school
with me—friends, you know; furnish the
horse, then go along, too. Some of the time I
stayed out on the ranch. He abandoned the
big ranch house, and he had an old fellow
that used to be a bull whacker in the Dakotas
in the early days out there: Al van Epps. Al
would watch the farm in the wintertime, and
then was there with me in the summer. So I’d
stay out there quite a bit in the summertime
sometimes.
Through that period after high school
I did go to work in the Moorlight mine, too,
up there tramming. They had a tunnel in
about a thousand feet, and you had to tram the
ore out from the stopes in there to the ore bin.
13
So I did that for quite a while. And then John
put me with an Italian, Barney Presbyterio,
running a drift by hand. I learned to single
jack and double jack with him. You drill the
holes in by hand that way, load them and blast
instead of having any machines. And then I
went into the mine and learned how to run
all the machines: the liners, which clamp on
a shaft and you crank them to push this drill
in, while they’re drilling; and then the stoper
that drills overhead—they called them a
stoper or wiggle tails; and then you had the
jackhammers— you’ve seen those around
on the streets and everything where the man
holds it. So, I learned to use all of those.
You don’t seem to be able to get away from
mining.
No. No.
This strikes me as quite a contrast with what
you did when you were younger. Obviously you
enjoyed being out of doors a great deal, and
then it seems that you find yourself working
underground most of the time.
Yes, but in the summers I worked for
the Forest Service in Granite County. I don’t
remember how I got the job. Of course, you
knew everybody around; somebody must’ve
mentioned it or something! I had a horse
and had access to other horses, because I
had to have a saddle horse and a pack horse,
see? So I got the pack horse from John, and
I had the saddle horse. The ranger, gave me
a key to the warehouse, and I could go down
there and load up the pack horse. He taught
me how to pack the pack horse and throw a
diamond hitch. So I would load up all my deal
and head out into the hills. He d point out
the trails on the maps. I’d head out into the
hills and go over these trails to clean them all
14
James W. Calhoun
out, because in those days you hiked in to the
fires. They didn’t have 4-wheel-drive vehicles
or helicopters or anything like that, and so
the men hiked in to the fires, and equipment
and material went in by pack horses. They
wanted to keep all these trails open all over the
mountains in case of fire so they could get to
them. That was my job—wandering around,
cleaning all these trails.
Up in the mountains down by Maxville—a
station on the railroad going to Drummond—
they had a Forest Service cabin. I stayed there
for quite a while to work out of that. I had
decided to learn to play the saxophone, and
that was a good place to learn to play it. I had
the saxophone and a correspondence course,
so I took it out with me to the cabin and
started practicing on it. And my dog quit me
and went home. [laughter] So the next
time I went in after food I took the saxophone
in and took the dog back out with me. I never
did learn to play the saxophone.
I would probably have stayed with the
Forest Service. I liked that real well and
everything. In those days the ranger had
pretty much control of the whole district that
he run.Things worked out pretty well with the
local man handling it that way. The ranger I
was with was a great big fellow; Townsend
was his name. Toward the end of it there
when I worked for him, they were starting
to get so many directives from Washington,
D.C. telling him what to do and everything
that he got disgusted with it and was going to
quit. I think that influenced me. I didn’t want
anything to do with a bunch of characters in
Washington telling me what I had to do, and
so I didn’t pursue that any. I think I worked
2 seasons at that Forest Service job in the
summer. I was working in the mine in the
winter. And then one summer Uncle John
had a couple of kids come out. I think they
were about 17 then. One of them was a son of
the head of the Burgess battery company, and
the other one’s father was the president of a
railroad in New York. They wanted the kids to
have some experience, I guess. So they came
out, and I had a saddle horse for each one of
them from John, and then I had a couple of
pack horses. I took them all over that area of
the Rocky Mountains that summer, camping
and fishing the alpine lakes and gave them
quite a summer’s outing in the mountains
that way. I taught them how to camp and pack
horses and ride horses, and that was quite
interesting—getting paid for a good vacation.
[laughter] After they left, I never did hear any
more from them or about them or anything
else.
Sometime through that period another
young fellow and I took contracts after we
got to be pretty good miners—took contracts
running prospect drifts down the mine. That
way you have to drill a round and blast it,
and the next day muck out that round and
drill another round and blast it before you go
home to keep the drift running that way. It all
depended on the hardness of the ground. You
make anywhere from 3 to 6 feet a day, and we
made pretty good money at that for a while.
When the ordinary wages were $4 a day, we
sometimes made as much as $11 a day. But
then, I guess it was the Depression coming on
or something, work just fell off in the mines.
I went to Seattle, where the folks were, and
tried to get work around there. I got a job with
a painting contractor, painting houses. I had
painted Dad’s house a time or two. I thought I
was a painter, but, boy, when I got to painting
with that guy—2 ladders and a plank between
them, you know? Go up the ladders and onto
this plank and paint! I learned you had to take
the brush in your fist and swing your arm and
paint! And I had to keep up with him, and for
Adventures Above and Below the Ground
about the first 4 or 5 days I thought my arm
was going to break off. [laughter] But I made
out all right. He didn’t fire me.
I painted with him until he run out
of work for a while there, and then I went
up the Great Northern tunnel, where they
were running an 8-mile tunnel through the
Cascades. They were running from both ends.
They had a shaft down 5 miles from one end
and 3 from the other, which they called the
Mill Creek Camp.
That’s where I went and got on the
loading gang in the rings there. They would
run a large-sized tunnel in—about 12 feet
wide and maybe 10 feet high, something like
that— which they called the pioneer tunnel.
And then a big jumbo machine would come
in with a bunch of liners on it. They would
drill a ring of holes right around the tunnel,
about every 5 feet or more, depending on the
hardness of the ground. When they blasted
that out, why, it left a hole big enough for a
double track railroad through it.
Our job was to load all of the holes
around the rings with 40, 60 and 80 percent
nitroglycerin powder and electric primers,
which were all timed. You had to put them so
that everything went off in rotation when the
shift boss threw the switch. The shift boss had
the key to the box out down the drift there,
and when we got through and ready to go off
shift, he opened the box and threw the switch.
The whole blast went off, and then after that
you had a great big muck pile in there, of
course. They laid track in just like a railroad,
and this big shovel come in on the track with
gondola cars, and they loaded the dirt in that
and took it back out.
When I had finished working on the
tunnel, I returned to Philipsburg. There was
still no work in the mines, so I picked up 4
friends, went to Seattle and joined a salmon
15
fishing company to go to Alaska. They paid
our way on one of the Princess ships up to
Alaska. In those days, you know, there was
no road or airplane traffic; it was all by boat.
The ship took us up to Juneau, and then we
went out on the tugs and cannery tenders, out
through the islands to where the fish come up
from the ocean in big schools,h eading for
these rivers to go up and spawn. Two of the
fellows went on one of the cannery tenders;
one of them had been in the navy some and
had experience in the engine room, so he
caught on there pretty good. And my partner
and I went on a pile driver, building the big
traps for the fish.
The traps were made of big logs about
4 feet in diameter, lashed all together,
floating on the water. They make several
compartments in this trap. Then they run a
cable 1,000 feet out from the shore, and you
hang nets on it with weights on the bottom
so they hang straight down. The fish coming
up along the shore to go up their streams hit
this net and follow it over to an opening into
the trap. The trap is where you put this stuff
about like chicken wire all around on each one
of these compartments and weight it down
with rocks, so it hangs there and it makes a
regular basket in there. The fish swim into
that, swim around in there, and then there’s
another opening a little smaller. They go into
another compartment...and keep that up so
that they don’t go back out again. See, they
keep getting smaller openings when they get
in there till they get up to the end one, which
is a long one along the end of the trap. They
go in there and can’t find their way out.
Then the cannery tender comes alongside
the end of the trap with a scow. The steam
hoist on the cannery tender has a boom out
with a cable hanging down with a net on it.
There is an iron bar on top with a net strung
16
James W. Calhoun
along, and then it hangs down. Then there’s an
iron bar on the bottom of the net that drops
down in alongside the compartment in the
trap. And one guy on each end has a rope and
lets the rod drop down to the bottom, and
then each one pulls on his rope and pulls this
rod across the bottom of the trap over to the
other side. Then the hoist on the boat lifts it
up this way and spills all the fish over into the
scow.
After we got the traps built, then we went
on the cannery tender, too—the tugboat. My
partner and I were putting the thing under the
fish and dumping them in the scow. Then we
would go into the cannery that way, and then
we had to get in the scow with the fish with
boots on. We had a pitchfork with only one
tine on it, and you pitched the fish off onto a
conveyer belt that went into the cannery until
you emptied the whole thing. And then we’d
go back out to the traps again.
Did you prefer that to mining?
Oh, no! It was just something to do. There
wasn’t much work mining then, and so...you
know, it was an adventure for a bunch of
guys. We did that most of the summer, till the
salmon runs ended.
When we were through, we went into
Juneau and got a job in a sawmill. We were
on the cutoff saws, and taking the boards
when they come out and sorting them and
piling them around the lumberyard. So the 4
of us stayed in Juneau working there until it
was time to get out of there in the fall. There
was a few, of course, stayed all year. In Juneau
there was a little guy there that every ship
that’d come in, he’d come down on the wharf
and play his Jew’s harp and march back and
forth. And everybody said that old Joe had
just missed too many boats. [laughter]
They had mines running there, too. The
train went up around the hill to the mine and
then come back down to the mill by Juneau.
But we found that they were using a caving
system up there, which was a pretty dangerous
system. We decided we didn’t want any of that,
so we went to work in the sawmill till time to
leave. This must’ve been right around 1930
or so, I guess, because when we got back to
Seattle the Depression was going strong. There
wasn’t any work, and we went over to Yakima
and picked apples over there. The orchard
people hadn’t had any money for spraying the
trees, and the apples were all wormy. You had
to pick S or 6 apples and throw them down
on the ground before you found a good one.
When you got your basket full—that hung
on your neck—you went down the ladder
and dumped it into a regular wooden apple
box. When you got one of those full of good
apples, you got 5¢. We made enough to pay
for our room and enough to eat on, but that
was all.
When we got through with that, we went
picking hops in Yakima. Are you familiar with
these great big sacks that they put wool in and
all? Well, you had to fill one of those with no
twigs in it or anything—clean picking. And
you got a dollar for one of those full. You could
fill about one a day. Finally that harvest was
over with, and then one of the fellows went
back to Philipsburg. I think the other one’s
mother by that time was in Seattle, and he
stayed there.
My partner and I took a job with a
timber man that was cutting pulpwood out
on Whidbey Island. These big trees, about 3
or 4 feet in diameter, were cut in 6-and-a-halffoot lengths, and then my partner and I had
to get up on the log and chip it with the axe.
You couldn’t just strip the bark off, because it
would leave the sap on there that would mold
Adventures Above and Below the Ground
when they piled it down on the wharf. So we
had to chip a piece of wood out with each
one and split these chunks up into cordwood,
and then pile them. We got a dollar a cord
for doing that, so we didn’t make much over
a dollar a day at that, too. That got tiresome
pretty quick, so we went in to Seattle and
my partner, George McDonald—everybody
called him Pinto; a small guy—he went back
to Philipsburg.
I stayed around Seattle for a little while
then and couldn’t get work. I stayed with the
folks that winter trying to find work and just
helping the folks out. Then I went back to
Philipsburg, and I got a job as a chain man
on a survey crew, working there through the
summer on that.
17
3
Marriage, Family and the
Decision to Move to Nevada
I was staying in Philipsburg at the
Moorlight building in a room upstairs. Jack
Harrah, who owned the mine with John, had
an apartment up there, too. I came down
from my room one day. The stairs came down
and right out onto the sidewalk on the street.
Just as I arrived there it was raining quite a
bit, and Jack drove up in front of the garage
doors. They had a big garage for the vehicles
downstairs there, and I opened the door
for him so they wouldn’t have to get out in
the rain. He had this gal with him—a niece,
Thelma, from back east—so he introduced
me to her. I didn’t pay much attention to it at
that time—went my own way. But it was a big
adventure for her, coming from New Jersey.
Jack took her to the Anderson ranch, and
she went with the cowboys taking the 400
cattle from the ranch 18 miles up into the hills
for their summer pasture. The survey crew
came down late that afternoon and stopped at
Porter’s Corner, which was a crossroads place
about 7 miles out of Philipsburg where they
served beer. Prohibition wasn’t very good in
Montana. [laughter] We stopped there to have
a beer, and just as we stopped, up comes the
cowboys with Thelma. They had a bear tied
outside there, and Thelma’s horse shied at the
bear and jumped to one side. Thelma landed
on the ground, and I went over and picked
her up. [laughter] So that was my second
encounter with her.
I don’t think Thelma could cook anything
then much except strawberry shortcake with
Bisquick, which was very new on the market
at that time. But she plied me with strawberry
shortcakes, and I started taking her out. I
took her horseback riding and fishing and
huckleberrying. She thought that country was
great, I guess, and she liked it all; and by the
time she left that fall, we were engaged. We
couldn’t get married because she wasn’t 21 yet,
and her father wouldn’t give any consent. His
daughter way out there in the wild and wooly
West with some miner! He wanted nothing to
do with it! [laughter]
Thelma went back home, and 3 friends
and I took a lease on an old mill to clean up
the quicksilver that had splashed over from
the pans. It had settled into the crevices in
20
James W. Calhoun
the granite out there, and was full of sand;
the heavy quicksilver went down in those.
So we took a lease on the thing, and I worked
out there for the summer and made about
miners’ wages, about $4 a day, cleaning up
the quicksilver.
We had to put up a big mast and boom,
and we had a chain block on the end of the
boom. The granite was all broken up, from
natural earthquakes and things, into blocks.
The sand settled into the cracks in these blocks
and the quicksilver was down in there. We’d
root out these blocks and clean them all up,
run the sand out by the creek where we had a
sluice box, and then we’d hoist the big granite
boulders up with this chain block onto the
boom and swing them out and drop them out
of our way. So we worked at that cleaning up
quicksilver. Three of us did the work in the pit,
and we had an old guy, Clyde Daniels, with us
that did the cooking and running the sluice
boxes.
Quicksilver was from $200 up to $300 a
70-pound flask. So we made about miners’
wages out of the thing until toward fall when
the price of quicksilver went down so low that
we couldn’t make any more money out of it.
We had to take out too much overburden to
get what we could, and it went way down in
price. So we had to give that up.
That winter I went back into the mines. I
was mining again and saving up some money
to send to Thelma for her to come out next
year, which she did. She waited till she was 21,
and I sent her the money. Thelma came out
and we were married in August of 1934.
What kind of family did Thelma come from?
Well, her father, Grant Davis, was general
manager of Lima Locomotive Works in Lima,
Ohio for a long time. Then he was transferred
to New Jersey out of there. He sold these
big shovels and dragline outfits, and he was
stationed in New Jersey at that time. Made
good money, I guess, for that period.
Had Thelma received any education after high
school?
She had one year at Ohio State University,
was in nurse’s training school in Lima, Ohio,
then transferred to Jersey City Medical Center,
and also was with the Powers Modeling
Agency in New York for a while. Thelma
had gone to a Catholic boarding school—St.
Mary’s on the River in Monroe, Michigan. She
wasn’t Catholic, but she went to a Catholic
school for a while until that burned down.
She graduated from high school in Lima.
That’s where she went this year, back to her
fifty-fifth anniversary.
Were the families present for your marriage?
No. She had to come out on the bus, so
I met her over in Butte. Milton Doe, a close
friend of mine that I went to school with,
had gotten married about a year or so before
that. He and his wife, Ruth, went over with
me. In fact, they took me over in Milt’s car
because I didn’t have any. We were married in
Butte and then had dinner late that afternoon
and came back. A couple of friends of mine
were living in our old house up there, so I
had to get them to move out so I could fix
it up for Thelma! [laughter] We started up
housekeeping there. She started learning how
to cook and everything. Her family had always
had servants. She can tell all kinds of stories
about her experiences on being a housewife.
The next year in May, twin sons were born.
There was no hospital or anything there—our
nearest hospital was 30 miles away over dirt
roads. They had an old doctor for the mining
camp, you know. The twins didn’t come out
Marriage, Family and the Decision to Move to Nevada
right; one that was supposed to come out last
was trying to come first, and one of them was
delayed too long and didn’t live. We never
could get him to breathe.
We put in another winter there. The
house wasn’t insulated at all, you know. In
those days, they didn’t have any... there was
an open attic and nothing but wallpaper on
the walls. It got down to 40 below zero and
we had to keep the fire going red hot in there
all the time. The frost’d seal around the doors
from the moisture in the house, and we would
have to take an ice pick and chip it in order
to get the door open. Around the baseboards,
wherever there was a nail that had been sunk
and puttied over, there was a little gob of
frost sticking out all around it. Jimmy had
pneumonia at 9 months, and Thelma’s sister
had come out and had been sick. We had quite
a time through all of that.
So in 1936 we decided to maybe get out
of there and see if we couldn’t find something
else rather than being a miner. I was doing
all right in the mine. I got $4 a day and they
changed me down to the mill, which was
paying $6 a day— pretty good wages then. But
we decided we would try to do something else,
so we went down to San Francisco. Thelma’s
folks had moved out west and were living in
Burlingame, California. Her father had been
transferred there, I guess. So we went down to
where they were, and I was looking for work.
I couldn’t find anything much, but I did get a
part-time job in the Bethlehem Steel Works
shipyard there, repairing ships when they
came in. It wasn’t a very steady job. A ship
would come in; the crews would work on it
repairing it and have to get it ready for some
tide going out. It’d go out, and then there
might not be anything more for a while.
Did you have to pick up a new skill to work in
the shipyard?
21
Yes. Had to pick up a new skill, but most
of my work was repairing machinery in there.
Of course, the guy I was working with knew
all about it, 50 I was just a helper.
We were working on one Japanese boat,
and had to get out and work on the propeller,
and these guys were painting up above us
with that red paint that they put on them.
It was splattering down on us. It got all over
us, and they wanted to make the tide out in
the morning, so they wouldn’t let anybody
off that night. I had no way to get word to
Thelma or anything. We worked on it right
on through the night. Thelma got worried
and called her mother; her mother came over
in the morning. Thelma was fit to be tied
because she couldn’t find out anything. Finally
I come home about 11:00 with this red paint
splattered all over me! [laughter] She liked
to have fainted when I walked in the door!
Thought I’d been in a big accident.
But that shipyard job wasn’t too good,
so then I wrote and contacted a friend up
in Grass Valley at the gold mine up there.
lie said, “Come on up.” It was the IdahoMaryland Mining Company. I went up and
got a job with the Maryland and went to
timbering with another fellow there. Then we
got a house, and I timbered for quite a while
there—timber man putting in timber where
needed and putting in chutes and laying the
pipelines all over the place for the air and the
water. Finally I was promoted to shift boss. I
had 3 of the levels on the mine—the 9, 10 and
11—and I had as high as 120 men under me
on that. I was shift boss there until Roosevelt
closed the gold mines down on December 8,
1941. [Actually, it was October, 1942, before
the War Production Board issued Limitation
Order L-208, effectively closing the nation’s
gold mines. However, restrictions on gold
mining had begun almost immediately
following Pearl Harbor.—ed.]
22
James W. Calhoun
Before I was shift boss, they put me
with a graduate mining engineering student.
When they take all the ore out, in order to
hold the back of the stopes—it’d be a roof
to you; these stopes usually go up kind of a
slant—they’d leave a great big pillar of rock
in there. Well, this one stope on the eleven
hundred level had very high grade veins of
gold going through some of the pillars, and
they wanted to get that. So this guy and I
went in there and built a crib out of logs—
you know, like cordwood—built a square
like that, piled them on each other, and
then wedged it good and let this crib take
the place of the pillar. We would take the
pillar out, and then we would cob down the
quartz as best we could to get the high grade
gold out of it. We put this in little, rubberlined leather sacks that we had. One of those
about 8 inches wide and maybe a foot high
would be worth $5,000, and gold was only
$35 an ounce, then. They had a bigger one
that would be about $10,000. The rest of the
stuff we would take down and run it out and
let it go to the mill.
As soon as we got some of these sacks
full of this high grade, then we’d have to
take that down personally to the station and
ring a certain signal on the bell that we were
coming up. The foreman would meet us at
the top of the shaft, come to the shaft when
we came up, take the bags from us and take
them over to the assayer. The assayer would
get the gold out of them and make it into
bars right there, instead of going through
the mill to be processed. Old Earl MacBoyle
had an airplane, and I’m quite sure—in fact,
everybody figured that—that these gold bars
went into the airplane and went to Mexico
where he got a lot bigger price than $35 an
ounce for it. But it was a pretty responsible
position to get that out and not to cave the
whole damn stope in doing it.
When the mine closed I went down to
Marysville and worked on Camp Beale for
the armed forces. They were building a big
camp there. I worked there for a while, and
then we decided to go on to Seattle. We went
up to Seattle and found a place to stay. I got
a job in the shipyards, and Thelma went to
work in Boeing Aircraft.
We had a house rented, but pretty soon the
landlady got anxious and wanted a place to
stay. So rather than kick us out, why, I made
a deal with her. I built an apartment in the
basement for she and her daughter—fixed
it all up so they could use that, and didn’t
charge them anything. Our refrigerator was
down in the basement, too, and the doggone
daughter would have company in—her
friends—and use stuff out of our refrigerator,
and everything was on food ration stamps in
those days, you know. And they would take
our milk out and leave it sitting on the table
where it would sour, and like that.
It was getting to be kind of an impossible
situation. The landlady wanted the house,
and we couldn’t find any other place to live at
that time. I had transferred from the shipyard
out to building anti-aircraft towers around
the airport in Seattle, and I wasn’t even on
essential work there. [“Essential work” was
work thought by the government to have a
direct effect on the war effort. Those engaged
in it enjoyed certain benefits withheld from
others.—ed.] And the doggone contractor
kept taking another fellow and myself off to
work on a big warehouse down on the wharf
for his own personal good! That wasn’t our
business, of course, but we decided that we’d
leave there, and so I went to the ration board
and asked for tickets to go to Los Angeles,
where Thelma’s sister, Betty, was living with
her family. I had a letter from the tungsten
mine up at Bishop that I could come to work
there, because that was essential work, see. I
Marriage, Family and the Decision to Move to Nevada
told the ration board that if they’d give me gas
tickets to get to Los Angeles with my family,
I would find my own way up to Bishop. They
gave me the gas tickets and made me sign a
paper that I wouldn’t ask for any to come back.
We went down to Los Angeles, and I got
a job on a big housing project there. I was
working with the layout man. We stayed with
Betty’s family, but after a while the landlord
got anxious and told Betty they had too many
in the apartment there, and that she either
had to get rid of us or she’d have to move.
I was working building houses for defense
workers, but somehow they wouldn’t consider
that essential, and we couldn’t get a house
anyplace.
Thelma’s father was out there transferred
to Los Angeles then. He had ration tickets
because his was essential work. He had gas
tickets, and Betty’s husband, Walter Kroger,
had gas tickets because he was expediting for
the airplane companies to these little outfits
that set up shops in garages and were making
small parts for airplanes. We knew several
gas station owners, and so we gathered up all
the gas tickets we could for machinery and
boats and everything like that [laughter] and
took off from Los Angeles and headed up to
Bishop.
We had what they called a 5-passenger
Chevrolet Coupe, with not much room in the
back seat. So we had the 2 kids and a great big
dog that was part Doberman pinscher and
part bulldog, called Duke. He was a pretty big
dog, but he went with us clear to Seattle, Los
Angeles, back up to this country again!
Did you have a trailer attached to your car?
No! [laughs]
But you managed to get everything you owned
in that little 5-passenger Chevy Coupe?
23
It looked like Little Italy or something!
[laughter] I don’t think we had anything
strapped on the top; we just had everything
piled in the car, in the trunk and in the back
seat, and the kids and the dog in on top of
everything.
We were going up the canyon to the mine
at Bishop, and Thelma said, “You don’t want
to go back to the mines, do you?”
And I said, “No, I don’t.” I swung the car
around and came back down out of there.
We came into Nevada through Montgomery
Pass and tossed a coin to either go north or
go east. That took us east over to Highway 95
at the crossroads. Then it was go either north
or south, so we tossed another coin and that
sent us north.
Did you have any idea of what you were going
to find when you drove across the border into
Nevada?
Not too much, no. Of course, I’d heard
about Nevada quite a bit because it was so
much mining, and people were coming from
here to Montana, and people from there
going down to Nevada. So I had heard quite
a few things, but I had no idea about it. In
fact, Thelma didn’t know whether she could
stand it with all the desert and one thing and
another at first. But we got to liking it so well
that when we’d be coming back from Seattle
visits, why, you come over the mountains and
see everything opened up.. .we’d figure we
were home. [laughs]
Did either of you have any reluctance to follow
the dictates of the coin when you started flipping
coins to find out where you were going to go?
No. We had no idea what the heck to do,
so we were just doing it that way. Figured that
was as good a way as any.
24
James W. Calhoun
What had finally convinced you that mining
was not what you wanted to do for the rest of
your life?
Oh, it was so much up and down all the
time. And then I had seen so many fellows
die of what they called miner’s consumption,
you know. In fact, I think most of the young
fellows that I worked in the mines with up
there in Philipsburg are all dead now. I was
kind of leery of that and wanted to see if we
could find something else to do. I had gotten
into the construction so much by then—
working at Camp Beale and around Seattle
and Los Angeles, and building houses—that I
figured that would be much better than going
back into the mines. That was probably kind
of the idea— finding a place to light and kind
of go on in the construction trades.
Mining seems to be a pretty seasonal occupation
in a way. I don’t mean that it follows the
seasons, necessarily, but it’s a boom-and-bust
situation, and has been for quite some time.
Yes, it always was.
Was that a factor in your decision?
Yes. That’s one of the main factors, I think,
because I’d seen so much of it.
Mining is a notoriously dangerous occupation.
Were you ever injured?
No.
Had you suffered any problems at all that you
were aware of that were related to working
underground?
Oh, yes. I had a spot in my lungs. After we
were here in Carson City, I don’t remember
whether I had a physical examination or just
talked to a doctor about it, but I had some x
rays. I have a spot on my lungs that they’ve
been watching for years, but it hasn’t enlarged
or done anything.
Did you manage to save any money during all
of that time that you’d been working at one job
or another? When you left Los Angeles to go
to Bishop, did you have any savings with you?
Well, some; not a lot. In fact, we were
getting kind of low on funds by the time we
finally wound up in Carson City, running out
of gas tickets! [laughter] It wasn’t too much
security, but that never seemed to bother me
very much. I never was afraid of getting fired
off a job. always had the idea that I was looking
for a job when I got this one, and I always
figured I could get one, so it never did bother
us very much. We had enough that when we
got to Carson City, we weren’t going to starve
or anything like that; I don’t remember how
much we had.
We figured we would go until the gas
ration stamps ran out, but they were getting
pretty low when we hit Carson City. We
needed tires on the car, too, and you couldn’t
get them anyplace. But we ran across Mr.
George Salzman at the Dutch Mill—we were
eating there the next morning—and got
to talking to him. He was manager of the
Virginia and Truckee Railroad at that time
in Carson City. We found out that he knew
Thelma’s uncle from when he used to be in
Missoula, and he got tickets for us to get some
tires for our car.
We went up to Virginia City the next day.
We were just looking for a place to stay then
so we could look around. So we went into the
Bucket of Blood, I think it was, and they said,
“Well, there’s 2 houses for rent here that this
Catholic church owns—the big King mansion
Marriage, Family and the Decision to Move to Nevada
up on the hill and the parish house behind St.
Mary’s.” So we beat it down to Reno to the
priests and talked it over with them. A couple
of young priests come up with us and took us
to the King mansion on the hill. That had a
fireplace in every room, and we couldn’t figure
trying to keep that one warm in the winter, so
we went down to the parish house. Here’s this
big house with...the doggone living room was
about 30 feet, and the kitchen and one of the
bedrooms upstairs was about 30 feet up there,
and everything was furnished—davenports
and beds, everything...and a furnace like
stoking the Queen Mary! “Well,” we said,”
how much would this be?”
The priest said, “Do you think $25 would
be all right?” Well, we was figuring $25 a week.
Come to find out, it was $25 a month! So we
took it.
25
4
Virginia City 1943 - 1945
Virginia City looked very different than
from the way it does today. Many of the
buildings were unoccupied. There were no
neons or anything like that, and, of course, with
a lot of the store fronts closed most of the light
was just the street lights. There wasn’t hardly
any tourists in those days, of course. People
were too concerned with the war, and gasoline
was rationed and everything else. So, an awful
lot of the tourist trade they did get was the
military people from Stead, come up there to
visit at night, but they wouldn’t stay very late.
Maybe they’d be there late in the afternoon and
stay for an hour after dark or something, but
by probably 8:00 the whole town was dead.
As soon as we moved into the parish
house I started looking for work. Zeb
Kendall—the mining man who had made
his stake in Tonopah—was living in Virginia
City, and he wanted to sample all those dumps
up there to see if he could do any good with
them. So I took a job sampling the dumps
for him—digging into the dumps and taking
samples of the cross-section of the thing, so
that you get a fair sample that would indicate
how much value might be in the dump, you
know, for them to work in it. It didn’t turn out
that he could do anything with it, but it was
something to start out with.
Zeb Kendall was a rather quiet, kindly
old gentleman. He gambled frequently and
heavily—I think at 21. Some of the games
lasted 24 to 36 hours. He drove a large
sedan—one of the more expensive cars—and
he would ride up and down C Street, rarely
on any others, never getting out of second
gear. He liked our outgoing little red-headed
daughter, Patty, and used to pick her up
sometimes, and the old man and little first
grader would slowly traverse C Street!
Most of the men that had to earn a living
were gone to San Francisco and places in the
war effort, in essential jobs. The few men that
were up there were mostly the old fellows and
old characters like old Deacon and Axel and a
few of them like that that would be of no use
to the war effort! [laughter] And children..
.a lot of the women were gone, too, at that
time. And I wasn’t there too much of the time
during that period of sampling for Kendall.
28
James W. Calhoun
Then I ran across a young French guy
named La Blanc—we just called him “Bugs.”
He and I made a deal with Bronco Lazarri, the
owner of the Union Brewery bar. We would
tear down the houses and take all the nails out
of the lumber and sort it and pile it, and then
get a dealer up from Reno. lie would buy it,
and we would go down to Bronco’s and give
him his share of it. We tore down about B or
10 houses up there—small ones, you know,
that had been left to Bronco by old miners.
He loaned them money and gave them drinks,
and they left him their property—had no one
else to leave it to, probably. A lot of the houses
were in good shape. There was an awful lot of
good lumber, because it was virgin pine that
was cut up in the mountains here. A lot of it
was very clear pine that you’d pay a fortune
for nowadays. The two-by-fours were not like
you see now. They were all rough, not planed
like they are now. So they were a full 4 inches
thick instead of the 3 5/8. The same way pretty
much with the joists and the rafters. It was
all very good lumber as far as lumber was
concerned and not very many knots in it, you
know. So they picked out good stuff in those
days, because it was coming right from the
mills up at Glenbrook.
One day Bugs stayed up working and
I went down with the dealer to Bronco’s to
settle up with him. We were having a beer
there while we did it, and had the beer in
a glass. I was turned talking to the dealer.
I happened to catch a movement out of the
side of my eye, and looked and saw Bronco
pouring whiskey in my beer to get me drunk
so he could make a better deal! [laughter] He
was quite a character.
Who was buying the lumber? Can you recall
the name of the dealer?
No. I don’t.
I was wondering about the motivation for
tearing them down. You are telling me that they
were well-constructed houses that were in no
danger of collapsing.
Yes.
Did Bronco then feel that he couldn’t make a
profit by holding on to them and...?
He must have, I guess. He never did
explain to us, and he just agreed to it. He
would do anything for money! When we
propositioned him, he designated the houses
to tear down.
Oh, you went in and worked the deal with him
yourself? That was your idea to tear the houses
down? I didn’t understand that.
Yes, we went and propositioned him for
a deal like that, and he agreed to point out
the houses for us to tear down. I guess they
were so small and everything, I don’t think
they were too good for the advancing times
of renting them. And, of course, there would
have to be a lot of work done on them—
improving the plumbing and facilities and
things like that that would cost quite a bit of
money. Bronco just probably figured it would
never pay to try and fix them up modern so
that he could rent them, so he would do just
as well to get what he could out of the lumber
when he had a chance. I never did take it up
with him on just how he figured it. All we were
interested in was getting some work to do.
What led you and Bugs to go to him? Didyou
go to any other people, or did you just decide
that he was the guy?
No. We found out.. .well, you could find
out most anything in the bars, and we found
Virginia City 1943 - 1945
out about Bronco owning so many buildings
around town, so we just went to him.
When you were through with his, did you
attempt to do this for anybody else?
No, when we got through with that part
of it, we went to work for Isbell Construction
Company on the big shops and garages on
South Virginia Street in Reno. Then we went
over to Ely, building those big ones where they
were stripping the overburden off of the Ruth
copper pit there. Of course, doing that, I was
gone for the full week and only come home
once in a while on weekends.
So you didn’t have much contact with Virginia
City over that year-and-a-half period?
No. I can’t even remember all of our
friends in Virginia City. There was “Ole” Hart,
who owned the Brass Rail; her husband, Pat,
was overseas. Hobe and Betty Leonard, who
owned the Virginia City Water Company,
were descendants of the Hobart Leonard clan
which had large holdings in the area. They
would take friends fishing up to Marlette
Lake (which I think they owned) . They had
a little summer cabin on the island. You could
fill your boat in a couple of hours! We never
fished there, but we watched them.
Dan and Ruth Sexsmith (her maiden
name; I don’t remember the married name)
lived in a big old house 2 doors from the
“Castle.” Pappy Sexsmith, Ruth’s father, owned
a downtown building, and the loft was filled
with relics. Thelma got enough old flocked
wallpaper there to paper the flats for a show
put on by the Proscenium Players, a dramatic
club she belonged to in Carson City. The paper
was left over from that used to paper the club
rooms of the Mackay-Fair-Flood and O’Brien
gang. Zeb Kendall was a good friend. Other
29
friends were the Byrne family—Alice Byrne
took care of our kids when Thelma had to go
to Reno at midnight for emergency surgery.
Her husband and son, John, used to work for
me when I had the Fink and Mahoney claim
in the Comstock mining area.
I gather from what you were telling me about
your deal with the Catholic church that the
church was not very active in Virginia City at
the time that you were up there.
There wasn’t anything going on much,
except a priest would come up each Sunday
for services there, and that was all. They had
no art gallery or anything else going like they
did later.
Would they open up the entire church?
St. Mary’s in the Mountains church had
a smaller, quite plain chapel on the basement
floor where Father Robert Smith would
hold services. The congregation was mostly
women—no men in town—and the Altar
Society was fairly active. They gave a lot of
bridge parties. Bob liked us and would cross
the street to visit us most Sundays. Once he
stood behind our curtain and looked at the
parishioners standing on the porch where
he had bade them “good-bye” and said, “You
know they are all saying, ‘What’s he doing
visiting them so much—they’re not even
Catholic!’”
One time we had taken in a couple of
truck drivers for some reason to stay with
us a little bit when they needed it, and they
were appreciative of it. Come Easter, they
bought the kids a white rabbit, and we had
that around there. The rabbit used to get
up on the davenport. So Sunday come and
the priest came over. The rabbit was under
the davenport, Thelma trying to keep it
30
James W. Calhoun
out of sight, and the priest sat down on
the davenport and we thought nothing of
it. And when he got up, on the back of the
black habit of his, there was white fur all over
it! [laughter] We didn’t dare say anything,
because we didn’t want him to know that we
had a rabbit running around in there, too.
I don’t know what he thought when he got
home and found all that.
You mentioned to me earlier that practically the
only thing to do at night was to go to the bar and
have a drink. Was there anything at all else to
do? Were there any social clubs, as an example?
Not that I know of. The Masons still had a
lodge up there. I guess they met once a month
or something like that, but there wasn’t very
many of them to meet. But that’s the only
one that I know of. Thelma had a Cub Scout
troop for a little while up there. She got pretty
P.O.’d at the natives up there, because she was
using some of our food stamps to get some
hamburger to take these Cub Scouts out, and
nobody would help us out with any ration
stamps for anything.
Did it feel like a closed society to you? Did you
feel that you were not welcome up there?
Well, with some of the people, yes. Some
of them were all right, but some of them were
pretty distant.
The market for salvaged lumber probably was
a consequence of the fact that we were at war.
Oh, yes. It was.
Can you think of any other economic or social
impact of the war on Virginia City that you
were aware of while you were up there?
No. Not very much, except that even at
that time they must have been depending an
awful lot on tourism, and, of course, there
wasn’t any tourists. So everything was pretty
dead.
Virginia City really had nothing to offer
socially or for our children; all there was to
do there was drink. There were, I think, 12
saloons, and in order to survive all but one
would close each night. Everyone went to
the open saloon to congregate and discuss
the war, hard times and water shortages.
Water was supplied through the flumes by
an inverted siphon arrangement manned at
the water company house at Lakeview. When
it got very cold, the flumes would freeze and
no water reached Virginia City, so they had to
depend on water stored in the tank at the head
of Gold Gulch. Everyone would take their
buckets and wait at the nearest hydrant for an
employee to turn it on, and then they would
take as much as they could carry home. All
the men would climb the hills to the flumes
and chop out the ice till they got the water
moving again. It was pretty primitive.
Occasionally, a field would catch fire in
the summer. Everyone would lock up shop
or whatever they were doing and head for the
fire with cans of water with sprays on their
backs—wet carpeting, anything to help stop
it. Virginia City was nearly done in several
times by fire, and everyone was scared of it.
Did you ever hear any talk in the bars about
ways that they might try to revive tourism after
the war?
No. Everybody was just waiting it out,
I think, and then going to go back to where
they left off.
After I sampled for Zeb a couple of fellows
come up from Reno. I don’t know who put
Virginia City 1943 - 1945
them on to me, but they hired me to do some
work opening up a tunnel up there in the
Jumbo district. That’s above that settlement
over there on the east side of Washoe Lake.
There’s a canyon runs up from that over to
the Jumbo district up there, and there’s a
road comes from Virginia City up over the
hill to that district. There was a couple of
gold mines up there and a little bit of a mill,
and where the tunnel run in at this little mill,
these fellows wanted to open it up. There
was some cave-ins there, and so they hired
me to do it, and I hired some of the fellows
from Virginia City to help me. Johnny Byrne
worked with me for quite a while. And then
Andy Antunovich.. .he was a Russian and
married to an Indian. He had one hand off,
but he had this stump clear down to the wrist.
And that guy would put the shovel handle
across this stump like that, hold it on the end
with his other hand, and he could out-muck
most of the guys that I’d have working any
time.
After that Johnny and I worked for
George Salzman, who managed the Virginia
and Truckee Railroad in Carson City. He
wanted some of those big timbers out of the
tunnels up there. So that tunnel that goes
in right at Gold Hill station, Johnny and I
took out those big timbers there—ten-bytwelves and twelve-by-sixteen timbers—and
worked back in there taking those out until
one day the whole thing started creaking and
popping. So we got out of there and it caved
in!
Salzman was selling the timbers to some
contractor for the V & T, but I don’t know
who. I didn’t pay any attention. We just got
them out for him.
I’ve heard about salvage of various electrical
and metal fixtures from mines in other parts of
31
the state. Were you aware of any of that sort of
thing going on in the Virginia City area?
Oh, yes. All of the old mines were stripped
at that time by junk dealers and one thing
and another coming in. They would grab
everything they could—the brass fittings from
the old engines and the engine rooms, and
the.... They would tear up the tracks of those
small rails as much as they could: everything
that they could get loose and take in the line
of brass and iron were stripped from an awful
lot of the old mines around.
They were doing this without the permission
of the owners?
Oh, yes. Yes. I took up a claim that I ran
across up there at Jumbo. We were working
up there and watched it, and it wasn’t filed
on that year, so 1 filed on it. It had a tunnel
in the hill and then a stope up, and the stope
caved in to the surface; you could get down
in there a little ways from the surface. I got
down in there. Some of it, we panned; you
could get colors of gold out of it. So I hung
onto it for several years and used to go up
and do the representing work. Then my son,
Jimmy, got big enough, so I had him and
one of his friends do the representing work
for a year or two. I got busy in the museum
there and Jimmy went away, and I couldn’t
manage to do the representing work, and
some other guy jumped it. Then after that I
went up there, and he’d stripped all the rails
out of the tunnel and anything that was in
the old cabin that was there and sold them
all, I guess.
The claim was the Fink and Mahoney
property—pretty fair assay reports. When
Howard Hughes “bought Las Vegas” he had
some mining engineers up there on the Jumbo,
32
James W. Calhoun
and the last I heard, Summa Corporation has
the whole area under patented claims.
You had mentioned that you had been hired by
the 2 Reno men to clear the tunnel at the Jumbo
district. After that was cleared, did that mine
then go into operation again, or what?
No. I don’t know what they were figuring.
As I say, gold wasn’t any good then. It must
have been just figuring for after the war or
something if they could do anything with
it, but nothing ever came of it. They never
opened it up or did anything with it after I
left it.
Well, how did you come to form a relationship
with Isbell Construction? How did you get into
that?
Oh, just probably through the union. I
don’t know. Anyway, we were just looking for
work. They had 2 other fellows there, and they
hired Bugs and me. The 4 of us worked there
and then over in Ely. When I got through with
working at Ely, the other 2—it was a man and
his son—went up to Lake Tahoe and were
building houses themselves as contractors.
So we worked for a while for them up there.
This was after the war.
What were you working at when you moved
your family from Virginia City into Carson
City?
Right then I was up here in the V & T
roundhouse with Seaman Manufacturing, an
outfit that made rototillers that they wanted
to sell to the highway department for stirring
up the oil into the asphalt and making the
asphalt out on the road. They would ship
out the motors and rototiller drums. We
were building the frames up here, welding
them together in the V & T shops and then
putting them together. Jack Shaughnessy was
in charge of the job, and then he would try to
sell them to these highway departments and
county road crews and things like that around.
That job didn’t last very long.
Can you recall what led you to move the family
down from Virginia City into Carson City?
There was more work going around in
Carson City, you know—carpenter work and
that. And there wasn’t anything to do up in
Virginia City, except to go up to the bar and
drink.
5
Settling in Carson City
We were moving from Virginia City
to Carson City the day the war ended. I
had found a small house in Carson City,
and Thelma was bringing down the linens,
clothing, pots and pans. We didn’t have
anything in the way of furniture, and had
always rented furnished places. We got the
word that day that the war was over. Everyone
quit, and I drove the company truck. Jack got
a piano someplace, and we put it in the bed
of the truck and there was an impromptu
parade—Jack or someone playing the piano.
We rode up and down Carson Street most of
the night. People would bring drinks out to
us to keep us going!
Thelma had the car loaded with household
goods, the kids, her sister and her little girl,
and had stopped at the Virginia City post
office for mail. The town hall bell started
ringing to signal the end of the war. The streets
filled in minutes, and she couldn’t get her car
out—it was up against those high curbs. So
she got a sitter for the kids, and she and her
sister started elebrating. All the fellows from
Stead Air Force Base came up. Everyone was
tearing up their ration books—she said the
floor was ankle deep in ration stamps—and
people were cutting the ties off the servicemen
and draping them over the crystal chandeliers.
. .women’s hose, shirts. I guess it was quite a
party, and they danced in all that litter and
really had a gay old time!
Thelma was able to move her car about
7:30 a.m., picked up the kids and got her tank
filled with ration-free gas and got home about
8:00 a.m. I was sleeping on the couch of this
house we had rented, pretty hung over.
We moved to Carson City and got a little
house right over here a couple of blocks, on
the corner of Walsh and probably Musser.
We just stayed there a little while, because it
was pretty small and cramped for our family.
Shortly, we moved to a large house at the
north end of town; there is a filling station
there now. The house had once been lived
in by Hans Meyer-Kassel, the noted artist
who did many portraits of UNR presidents
and Nevada governors. The owner decided
to sell it, but we couldn’t afford to buy it and
move it, so we bought a piece of property
34
James W. Calhoun
owned by Thelma’s sister and her husband.
(Thelma’s whole family had moved here by
then.) There was a shack on it—2 rooms and a
kitchen of sorts—built by Dr. Fred Anderson’s
grandfather and grandmother.
The place had 3 little rooms in a row here
with a false storefront on them like they used
to have in the old days. It looked just like a
cribbage outfit in a whorehouse district, you
know. [laughter] We moved into that just to
have a place to stay; we couldn’t seem to find
any other place much around. So I said, “Well,
we’ll fix this up for a while and stay here, and
then when we get ready, we can turn it over
to Betty.
There was a kitchen here that the cows
had been into, in these 3 little rooms. We hung
a canvas in there that we stayed behind for a
little while to keep warm. We camped in it,
and whenever we got a little money we would
buy some material and build around us. I took
a little time off, and I built 3 bedrooms and
a bathroom on that end. Then I fixed up the
kitchen a little so we could use that. Christmas
Eve, I think it was, I cut the hole through there
into the other places. Thelma’s mother was
staying with us by then, so we had bedrooms,
then, to move into. It took 6 years and some
rough winters to finish it.
We had 3 bedrooms, a bath, living
room and kitchen. We added things as we
needed them. After the kids moved away,
went to college, et cetera, we finally added
a 22-foot-by-25 foot addition and another
bath. We know so many people that enlarge
their houses after the kids leave! Thelma was
seriously into painting by then and needed
a studio. And, with what seem like annual
improvements, this is where we live today.
When we first moved to Carson City,
I think the census figure for 1940—the last
census before we got here—was around 3,000.
Carson City never knew the Great Depression,
because most everyone worked for the state.
State government had to go on, and the stores
sold to those people who remained. When the
legislature was in town, there was a legal limit
to the length of the session. When they had
to run over (I think 60 days) , they would put
a cardboard over the clock. Most of the bills
were passed the last legal day, even if it was a
week long.
Social life in Carson early on wasn’t
much—just more of Virginia City. The owners
of the Old Corner Bar were very popular—
Pete Indart and Tim Martinez, both of Basque
heritage. The Senator Club next to the Capitol
was owned by Ken Johnson, a state senator.
Melody Lane was owned by Art and Mae
Cooper and offered Hammond organ music.
The Hot Springs was owned by Dick and Edith
Waters. It was a popular place for eating and
dancing. Dick was with the legislature, too.
The Ship Bar, across from the State Library
where the prow of the ship thrust out into the
street was popular. Ella Broderick’s bar and
gaming place was where the Nugget is now.
Ella was called Mrs. Republican because of
her devotion to the party.
In the earlier days there were a number
of dances, mostly held in the community
center on Carson and Ann streets, and at the
Hot Springs. We went to many affairs at the
governor’s mansion. Particularly when Paul
and Jackie Laxalt lived there, we went to more
family-type parties. We went to a Christmas
party when Paul had a portable floor made
for the north parlor for dancing.
When Thelma went to work for the state,
there were some parties, particularly after
she was research assistant to the Nevada
legislature. There were many parties when
the legislature was in session. Funny thing,
at the beginning everyone in town celebrated
the arrival of the legislators. They gave parties
for them and entertained them in their
Settling in Carson City
homes. There wasn’t much in the way of
hotels—the Arlington and the White House
were pretty much traps and catered mostly to
old single men, so if a legislator didn’t have
a friend here to live with, he mostly stayed
in Reno. Nowadays, Carson people dread
the legislature coming. It seems they are
here 6 months. They get all sorts of special
privileges, and they treat Carson City very
poorly.
It seems there were more disasters back
then. Big fires—when the lumberyard burned
down—and floods. One flood, they were
calling for volunteers to come down to where
the county library is now and turn on their
headlights so the guy trying to clean out the
ditch with a power shovel could see what
he was doing. All the women were making
sandwiches and coffee to take to the different
spots to feed the workers. There was also the
Kings Canyon fire—that was a big one. And
people don’t realize how precious water is. In
the early 1940s Washoe Lake was so dry, cattle
were walking across it with dry feet.
Our first close friends in Carson City
were Jane and Adrian Atwater—he was chief
photographer for the highway department. He
would get topographical maps, and we would
spend weekends junketing around the hills
to ghost towns like Lousetown, a stopover
for the freight routes from Virginia City to
the railhead at Sparks, named so from the
condition of the drovers.
After we arrived in Carson City, it
couldn’t have been over a couple of months or
so that I stayed with Shaughnessy at Seaman
Manufacturing Company. The rototiller
scheme didn’t work out, and the company
abandoned the idea. They couldn’t seem to sell
them around here or something. So they just
pulled out again—left it. I went to building
houses, then, and got a job with Pagni for
a while, building up at the northeast end of
35
town. Then with Bell and Vannoy, I built over
on the northwest side of town.
There was a boom in house building in
Carson City after the war. They were building
quite a bunch of them, all on the west side of
town. There wasn’t much going on over on the
east side. Our house here was within about a
block of the edge of town. The west was always
the plush side of town. The railroad went
down Stewart Street, so this was the other
side of the railroad tracks. All the big houses
of the old-timers were built on the other side.
The Virginia and Truckee Railroad was still
running on the track down Stewart Street,
going to Minden at that time.
The houses that were being built weren’t
what you’d call wealthy houses. They were
selling for about $21,000 at the time. They
were nice houses—most of them 2-bedroom.
They didn’t go for 3 and 4 bedrooms so much
then. But they were nice enough modern
houses, you know, with washing machines,
and they finally started putting in dishwashers
and so forth. They had modern bathrooms
and everything like that, you know—nice
houses, about like you would get now in the
$70,000 deal, except for the extra bedrooms,
maybe.
When we lived up on Carson Street,
Thelma’s father had died. Her mother came
to live with us,and her sister and her husband
and 2 kids. We had a big 2-story house up
there we were renting. There was no use of
the 3 women in the house taking care of the
4 kids, and Walter [(roger (my brother-inlaw) and I were working. So Betty and Mary,
Thelma’s sister and mother, went downtown
looking for a job. They come back that day
and said, “Thelma, we have just the job for
you.” They sent her down to the Department
of Education, and Mildred Bray, the state
superintendent of public instruction, hired
her for the job. That was probably in 1947.
36
James W. Calhoun
Thelma had the job of secretary to
Mildred Bray. There was only the 2 of them
in the Department of Education then— just
Mildred and Thelma. Then she went on from
there to be secretary and research assistant
to the Legislative Counsel Bureau. There
were only 3 of them there at that time: an
auditor, Al Jacobsen from Virginia City, and
Jeff Springmeyer, the legislative counsel, and
Thelma. So the 2 of us were working—the kids
were big enough to take care of themselves
pretty much here and going to school. But the
2 of us kept on working pretty much and using
the money to build our house and develop it.
What kind of plans did you have for your
children at that time?
Well, just to get them through college
or through with school. When they finally
graduated from high school, Jimmy went
to the University of Nevada for part of a
semester, and then all of a sudden he told us
that he had joined the paratroopers. He and a
partner of his joined the army and went in as
paratroopers. His partner didn’t make it, but
Jimmy continued on as a paratrooper through
all the training there and in Alaska and over
in Germany.
Patty decided that she was going to the
University of Washington—she went up there
and stayed with my sister and her husband
for a while to go to the university. She later
decided against that and came back and
went to San Francisco State University. She
had 2 girlfriends with her. The girls rented
a small penthouse! They had to go to work
to supplement what we were sending them.
Pat went to work nights for Ted Stokes, who
was an attorney with the Colorado River
Commission, preparing briefs or something
for the next day’s hearing in San Francisco.
She came back and went to UNR, got her
degree and did some substitute teaching after
she was married.
Jimmy put in his stint with the paratroopers
and came back. Then he went back to the
university and got a degree in education.
While he was doing that, he worked at Harrah’s
Club and was promoted up to security chief,
and he wrote the security manual for them
while he was there. Then they offered him a
better job to stay on. He came over to Carson
City and investigated a teaching proposition
as a math teacher and coach (he had made 2
all-state football teams in high school) , but
they were paying him much more at Harrah’s
than he could get teaching. He got his degree
from the university, but he decided that he
couldn’t go to teaching, and he stayed with
Harrah’s Club for over 20 years.
Thelma apparently got involved in politics at
some point.
Yes. She did later on. She was United
States Deputy Marshal for a long time,
appointed by U.S. Marshal Bill Stewart. It
was just another federal job advertisement
that came up after she quit the Legislative
Counsel Bureau. She was going to retire and
then decided she wanted to go back to work
again, and found this job with the marshal’s
office. She wasn’t content to just be a clerk
or anything, you know. She had to take the
pistol course and everything else, so she was a
marshal. She used to take care of all the money
for the office, and when the court met in Las
Vegas, she always had to take the checks down
there to pay everybody. Old Bill would just
sign the checks here, and she took all those
signed checks with her to Las Vegas—she was
kind of edgy about that sometimes.
She finally quit that job and got to painting
and one thing and another. She got to be
quite a painter. She was very interested in the
Settling in Carson City
painting and making pretty good money at it
for a few years there. Then the painting deal
kind of started dying out, and the election
here for city council came up. Two women, the
Carson City Appeal editor and someone else,
persuaded her to run for the council, and so
she got on the council for that session. There
were S of them on the council at that time—
the mayor and 4 councilmen. That council
was instrumental in getting Ormsby County
and Carson City consolidated into one entity
all called Carson City. Then she was out of it
for a while and just went on with her painting,
after she finished that term as councilman.
Later on it come up to the election for city
supervisors. A bunch of the women (and
men, too) persuaded Thelma to run for that,
because she had done such a good job as
councilman. Then there was a little dissension
about the supervisors they’d had lately, too.
So she ran for that and got elected and served
from 1974 through 1978. She was mayor pro
tempore in 1977 and 1978.
That’s how Thelma got interested in
politics. Of course, she’s been interested
in politics ever since. She did have quite a
reputation on her judgment and everything,
and it got to be around here that everybody
who wanted to know something called
Thelma Calhoun, [laughter] because she
knew so damned many people. She put in 10
years on the Council for the Arts—she was
instrumental in getting that bill through the
legislature, and she put in 10 years on that.
So with her reputation as a painter all over,
and on the Council of the Arts, and traveling
to Las Vegas on that and with the marshal’s
office, and the supervisor position here, she
knew an awful lot of people—besides, from
the Legislative Council work, she knew all
kinds of legislators, and so she knew an awful
lot of people around Nevada. Of course, one
of the highlights of her deal was one year
37
she was elected Woman of the Year by the
Chamber of Commerce here, and a year or so
later Distinguished Nevadan by the University
of Nevada-Reno.
Did you ever have an interest in politics
yourself?
No. My dad was in politics when I was
young, and I saw him work overtime at nights
and one thing and another in those days when
the veterans come back from World War I.
They could take up to 160 acres of farm land,
and he had to handle all the applications. I
saw a lot of them. He’d go up nights and work
overtime and everything, trying to take care of
all of them, and he still couldn’t make some of
them happy. I was only a teenager, but I almost
had a big fight with one of these veterans in
front of the pool hall one night because he was
spouting off about Dad not doing things right,
and I called him on it. But he didn’t take me
up on any fight or anything. I got disgusted
with it, is all— didn’t care much about it. I
never have wanted to go into any politics.
When you came here in the late 1940s, casino
gambling didn’t dominate the economic and
social identity of Carson City. What was most
important, both in social and economic terms,
in this city in the late 1940s?
I can’t say. There was always lots of
groups around here, like the different clubs
and organizations. They always had lots
of them going around Carson City. There
were several bars in town, but there wasn’t
anything big at all until Richard L. Graves
came in here and started up the Nugget.
That expanded into a bigger thing, so the
gambling really didn’t dominate things
around here at all. And, of course, there was
a picture show at that time.
38
James W. Calhoun
Were you and Thelma active in any particular
church?
No, I wouldn’t say we were active at all.
What about social clubs or fraternal
organizations?
Well, Thelma was one of the early
members of the Nevada Artists Association,
and that was her main interest as far as clubs
go. And she had been prominent in the garden
club for a long time. I belonged to the Lions
Club and served on the board of that for quite
a while, and then was president for one year.
What did the 2 of you do for recreation?
For a long time we didn’t have much time
for it. Once in a while we took a trip, but most
of the time that was up to Seattle, where my
mother and sister and her husband lived. My
mother was getting so old, and we figured
we should go up and see her. Some of the
good times we had occurred after I became
director of the museum, attending museum
conferences. Then we were able to go to San
Francisco and the museum there and see the
aquarium—go out behind the scenes and see
how it all worked. We went to Santa Barbara
and Los Angeles and Tucson, Arizona; and
one of the highlights was a trip to Mexico City.
Those were all delightful trips and interesting.
Once in a while we were able to do some more
on the way home, like coming home from
Tucson, Arizona, we went up through the
Grand Canyon, and Bryce Canyon and Zion
National Park and down to St. George, Utah.
With things like that, we got to travel around
a lot and see things.
Early on in this interview you were telling me
about how much you enjoyed life out of doors.
In fact, at one point you considered a career
with the Forest Service. How does that desire
to spend a lot of time out of doors fit in with
what you did for 24 years as director of the
museum? I guess you were able to spend a fair
amount of time out of doors in the various digs
that you attended.
Yes. Well, not only the digs, but the
museum’s mobile unit. The first trip with it we
went down to Las Vegas, and then we went
up the eastern side of Nevada, making dates
for the mobile unit to come to the schools. So
we saw those towns over there: Pioche and
Ely and Pahrump and Elko and so forth. At
that time we had the Western Speleological
Institute [see Appendix] going, so Thelma
and I stopped at Lehman Caves coming up.
We had our 2 speleologists exploring there,
and they just had a small generator outside
and could only run part of the lights in the
cave at one time. It was late in the afternoon
and the boys were still in the cave. We talked
to the ranger there, and he said, “Well, I’ll tell
you, I’ll give you the key and tell you how to
go in, but I want to take a shave. We’re about
to have dinner here.” So he gave us the key
and map, and Thelma and I started in.
You could only go part way and you
come to what they called a “birthday cake”
formation. Around behind that we found
switches, and you switch off the lights from
behind you and turn on the lights ahead of
you. We did that, and we finally got to the end
of it there. We hollered, and finally the boys
come out through a hole in the wall. They
had mapped that cave clear on, so that if they
wanted to extend the tour, they could have
you go clear through there and come out way
at the top of the hill and then bus you back.
They never have done that. I don’t know what
they ever did with all the plans. The boys
made a big map of the whole thing, too, and
Settling in Carson City
we gave it to the Park Service. But, anyway,
we saw Lehman Caves that way—a tour all by
ourselves. [laughter] Most weekends we tried
to do something out of doors with the kids—
ghost-towing, redwood forests, et cetera.
After living in many other places you settled
down here. Did you ever look back and regret
having decided to settle in Carson City?
No, we’ve always been very thankful that
we did. It’s been awful good to us. All of our
deal was kind of serendipity, you know—
taking things as we found them and making
the best of it. We have always been very
thankful that we settled here, because we’ve
done so well and enjoyed it so much. It’s been
good to us.
39
6
Building the Mine Exhibit and
Becoming Museum Director
I was working for Bell and Vannoy
in 1948, but contracting got slow in the
wintertime, and so I went up to build
cabinets for J. E. “Tony” Green, the director
of the State Museum. I think I found out
about that job just through us getting
acquainted with people and talking with
them. You know how talkative Thelma is....
[laughter] She meets everybody and she
knows all about them in just a little while,
and so she gets acquainted with people all
over. Also, Tony had several young people
working up there, making casts for the mine
rocks, and our son Jimmy was one of them.
He put Jimmy to work for a while up there,
so he knew I was a carpenter. I suppose he
must have hit me up to build the cabinets or
something in a conversation. We’d go up to
the Old Corner Bar for a drink, and so you
met everybody that you knew probably at
one time or another there.
The reason I went to the museum was
to build cabinets in the Gun Room for Tony
Green. Tony wanted the whole thing flocked.
I got the cabinets built and had to hurry up,
because this was another deadline deal when
they wanted to open it up for Nevada Day
or something—there was a deadline on it,
anyway. It was coming close, and I got the
cabinets built, and he wanted them flocked.
He showed me how to do it; I didn’t know
anything about flocking. I went ahead and got
the whole thing done and ready. I cleaned the
glass and put that back on, and that flocking
had come loose. The glass had static on it, and
you’d put the frame up there with the glass in
it, and this flocking would just float right over
and settle all over inside the glass. [laughter]
If I didn’t have one horrible time that night!
I was working at night trying to get the thing
finished up.
Had you been in the museum before you got
hired?
No!
Did you know anything about it?
No.
42
James W. Calhoun
What about Judge Guild and Major
Fleischmann? Did you know about them?
[Judge Clark J. Guild was born in Dayton,
Nevada in 1887. He graduated from the
University of Nevada, and was the auditor and
recorder for Lyon County from 1908 to 1916.
Guild was admitted to the Nevada bar in 1914.
From 1924 to 1953 he served as District Court
Judge for Nevada’s Eighth (later redesignated
First) District Court. Judge Guild founded the
Nevada State Museum in 1939.
[Major Max C. Fleischmann was heir to
a fortune derived from his family’s founding
of Fleischmann’s Yeast and Standard Brands,
upon whose board of directors he served.
Long a resident of Santa Barbara, California,
Major Fleischmann in 1935 moved to Nevada
to take advantage of the state’s favorable tax
climate. He constructed a substantial mansion
at Glenbrook, on the east shore of Lake
Tahoe.Until his death in 1951 Fleischmann
was a benefactor of many charities and
public projects in Nevada, including the State
Museum.—ed.]
I didn’t know about the judge and the
major. I just went to work building the
cabinets. Then Tony had me build a bunch of
the cages out in the zoo that he was making
there. When I arrived, Tony was just getting
the zoo started. He had a few birds, a hawk
and an eagle, picketed out there, but I built
the shelters for them. Then I built quite a large
case for a couple of raccoons that he got, and
smaller ones for an opossum, and he had a
fawn deer there in the yard. I finally started
taking care of all the animals, too, while I was
doing the carpenter work.
There was this fence around the yard, you
know, and all the tourists could come along
the fence on the outside, and nobody could get
in there. This large cage for the raccoons was
right out close to the fence. I got in there one
day to change their feed or something, and
the doggone door closed and locked on me,
and I couldn’t get out. Of course, this was after
Tony had left, I think, that I was doing it all
by myself—taking care of them. The building
man, George Smith, and secretary, Audrey
Bell, were clear over in the other end of the old
building. I couldn’t get word to them. So I was
over at the door with my pocket knife, trying
to work it in there, to try and work this lock.
So here’s the 2 raccoons climbing all over me,
up on my shoulders and fishing in my pockets
here. All these tourists on the outside of the
fence thought it was a hell of a good show!
[laughter] I guess they thought it was part of
the act or something, because they were sure
climbing over and looking in my hair and in
my pockets and me trying to get that damn
lock open. I finally did it after about 15 or 20
minutes and got out of it, but I put on quite a
show for the tourists for a while there. It was
rather embarrassing! [laughter]
The zoo was where the Clark J. Guild
Hall is now. That section there was all just a
fenced-in yard. Then there was a long annex
went out from the main building; it was the
boiler room for the old mint.
Did Tony Green ever mention to you what he
had in mind with that zoo, what his long-range
plans were for it?
Well, just as a children’s zoo. How much he
figured to put in there, I don’t know, but I’m
figuring mostly just the native animals from
around here. You know—small things; quite
a few of the animals and birds, both. He had
eagles and hawks all eating meat, Of course,
that would draw flies and a certain amount of
odor, so some of the neighbors around there
didn’t like it too well. But the zoo didn’t last
long enough to really cause very much of an
uproar.
Building the Mine Exhibit and Becoming Museum Director
43
How was he paying for all of this? Somebody
had to buy the animals and pay for their upkeep
and everything. Did the state...
in a way. How did Fleischmann and Guild
feel about the zoo? Were they consulted as to
whether or not it should be put up?
No.
They hadn’t been consulted much, and
that’s one reason that Tony lost his job. He
kept right on working on the zoo and putting
money into it, and he was supposed to be
concentrating on that mine exhibit. They
wanted to get that done for Nevada Day,
1950.
...or the museum board of trustees put money
into this?
He was using a little of the Fleischmann
money that was for the mine exhibit—the
$50,000 that Major Fleischmann had put
out. Also, he wasn’t buying much in the way
of animals or anything. They were donated
to him, like the fawn. Somebody found that
fawn out and gave it to him, and the raccoons,
and he had a hawk and an eagle. So he wasn’t
buying, I don’t think, at all—just depending
on donations for the animals.But he did have
to put out some money for lumber and for
building the cages and fixing it up that way,
and the meat to feed them and so forth.
You mentioned that you wound up taking
care of them after Tony Green left. Did he hire
anybody to take care of them while he was still
there, or was that something he did himself?
He did some of it himself, until when
I was building the cages for him. I kind of
worked into taking care of the animals, too.
So he let me do it, I guess. I liked the animals.
After he left I just kept on doing it to make
out, because I knew he couldn’t keep the thing
there. The museum board of trustees decided
to do away with it then. Of course, they didn’t
want it.
Judge Clark Guild was commonly acknowledged
to be the founder of the museum. And
certainly Major Max Fleischmann, who put
up substantial sums of money at fairly regular
intervals, was the chief sponsor of the museum
What can you recall about the incidents
surrounding Tony Green’s firing? How did that
occur?
Well, the main thing I know about it is
probably what Judge Guild told me after I got
close with him there and he was telling me
how the museum was started and everything.
I know Major Fleischmann was probably
instrumental in pushing the thing. He didn’t
get along with Tony very much, because
Tony wouldn’t do what he wanted. I know
one day down in the mine he was having a
big argument with Tony, when I was back
in there building cabinets. And I heard him
shout something about, “Goddamn you, if
you don’t do this, why, I’m going to pistol whip
you!” He always carried those pearl-handled
pistols on him, you know.
That argument led to Tony’s firing, or
I suppose it had quite a bit to do with it,
because it was shortly after that—at a museum
board of trustees meeting, I think—that they
decided to let him go. And as I say, I don’t
know anything about it, because I wasn’t on
the board or anything else. I just know what
Judge Guild told me. It all amounted to the
belief that Tony wasn’t getting the mine done
and was spending some of that money for
other things. And he argued with the major
too much about it, I guess.
44
James W. Calhoun
Did you ever talk to Tony Green about this
later on?
No. Tony left right after, as soon as they
let him go. They asked me to take over and
finish the mine. One of the things that they
wantedto know when they put me in there
was if I could finish it with what money was
left. I don’t remember just how much money
was left...I think about $30,000 of the original
$50,000 gift. I told them I thought I could. I
didn’t know a damn thing about it. [laughter]
I just figured that maybe I could, but I didn’t
see any big complications. It was fairly started
when I took over, and a lot of the problems
had been worked out—getting the material
and so forth.
Did they put you in charge of anybody when
you took over the assignment of finishing the
mine exhibit?
Well, the crew that was working, of course.
I was in charge of all of it. They called me a
supervisor. They put me on a salary because,
of course, I was only on hourly wages like
any carpenter before that. So they put me on
a salary; I don’t even remember what it was
now. Then after I made out all right, got the
mine opened up and everything, Tony made
several visits to the museum, but he would
never look me up. He’d go down and catch
George Smith in the back end, or somebody
like that, but he would never come and
look me up around the museum. I guess he
resented that I made good! [laughter]
When you took over the responsibility of
finishing the mine exhibit, did you have any
discussions either with Major Fleischmann or
with Judge Guild about how they wanted this
thing to proceed, or were you left on your own?
Oh, you got lots of instructions on
what they wanted—suggestions is what
they were more than anything. But you had
just so much room there to do things. You
had to put them in so it would look like a
mine. A lot of their ideas were impractical;
they just couldn’t be done. The major’d
come through on his way going to Reno
or coming back from Reno. He always
stopped, he was so interested in it, and he’d
have several ideas in his head and I’d just
listen to him and say yes and so forth, and
go on building the mine. When he’d come
back the next time, why, I’d have things
done—not what he told me or anything, but
I’d just go on ahead with the mine. Well, it
just looked all right. It was all right. So it
satisfied him, and he’d go on and come back
once in a while with some other idea. I don’t
think I ever did carry out any of his ideas,
but I got the mine done and it looked like
a mine, so that everything satisfied him.
Can you recall any of the specific ideas that
he had?
No. Not now. I don’t think I paid that
much attention to them, because I knew I
couldn’t do them.
Well, he happened to come in one day
when we were trying to outfit the figure of
the man at the hoist down in the museum.
And Debs Longero said, “Yeah, I need a pair
of suspenders for this guy.” So the major took
off and went down to the Cash Mercantile
and bought a pair of suspenders. Then he was
coming back up the sidewalk on the main
street, and he ran across this old fellow with
a pair of dirty, sweat-stained suspenders on.
He stopped him right in the street there and
traded suspenders with him, on the street,
and brought back these old sweat-stained and
Building the Mine Exhibit and Becoming Museum Director
dirty ones so it’d look all right down in the
mine. He was just an impulsive character
like that. [laughter]
When Judge Guild was trying to interest
the major in subsidizing the proposed mine
exhibit he had gone up to Glenbrook a time
or two. Once they were having a board of
trustees meeting, and Fleischmann came in
with his little deal of some cigar boxes and
some plaster put in them as a model of what
he thought was a mine. And he said, “Is this
what you fellows want?”
They looked at it...and William Donovan
was there, too; he’s the miner. [Donovan was
on the museum board of trustees. He had
operated precious metal mines in several
places over the years. At the time he owned
a mine in Silver City, Nevada.—ed.] So the
judge said, “The meeting is adjourned right
now! Bill, you’re going to take us up to Silver
City and let the major see what a real mine
looks like.” So they all went up to Silver City,
and Donovan took the major in the mine and
showed him what a mine looked like. So then
he got the idea. Then he put up the $50,000
to get going on it. And, as I say, he was really
interested.
He had put up the money before for
all those dioramas. He wanted the best
of everything on that, and so he hired a
technician at the Academy of Science in San
Francisco or someplace there.It was Cecil
Tose’s father who started them. He took the
contract to do them, and then he died and
Cecil finished it. They would build them down
there and bring them up and put them in here.
The major paid for all that, too.
I get the impression that it was more or less
Major Fleischmann and Judge Guild who were
determining what the museum would look like,
what exhibits would be in it and so forth?
45
Pretty much. None of the others ever put
up any money for it. The judge raised all the
money from the Fleischmann outfit, and then
old Carl Jacobsen over at Ely left him quite an
estate, too.
Well, apparently, at least during the planning
stage, the major and Judge Guild had different
ideas about what the mine exhibit ought to
look like.
Yes, evidently.
These are 2 very strong-willed personalities.
Yes.
Did they ever disagree after the thing was under
construction, about the detail of it?
Not that I know of. Not in any way. The
judge, of course, had seen some mines, but
the actual timbering and doing the mines and
everything, why, neither one of them knew a
great lot about that. They had to leave that to
the miners.
Did you feel that you had enough independence
to produce the kind of mine that ought to be
produced, then?
Oh, yes. They never did bother me much
then. I had pretty much full rein on building
the mine. And, of course, I had a couple of
good miners there to discuss things with. All
they had to know was what we wanted, and
they could go ahead and put in the timber
and put in the rock casts the way they should
be—the way the blasted rock looks down in
the mine, you know. The main trouble that I
had there was trying to get them painted, and
I had to do all that by myself.
46
James W. Calhoun
They paid for me to go down to Santa
Barbara for 2 weeks once to see the preparator
down there and see how things were done.
This was done at the Santa Barbara Museum
of Natural History, which was something else
that had been funded by Max Fleischmann.
I learned how to use plaster and the casting
and painting and all such things that go into
making those dioramas. But it didn’t help me
on painting the mine any, because when they
wanted to paint a surface to look like rock,
they took a paint brush and cut it off short in
the bristles and flipped it to spot around. But
you couldn’t do that with all those big areas
in the mine. So I kept trying to experiment
with something. You couldn’t use a spray gun
on the compressor, because that just made a
fine spray, and I couldn’t figure out anything
that way. Finally I got these Hudson fly spray
guns that you pump, and I started using those,
and that worked just perfect. You could make
a fine spray or you could just open it a little bit
and make large dots and go over it and get 2
or 3 of those with the different colors in. You
could put them on there, and it’d blend the
colors and work fine for making granite and
the different rocks that we wanted down there.
I don’t think we had any other problems
in the construction of the mine. After I got on
to making the rock look like rock, everything
went along fine. Putting in the timber wasn’t
any problem much. A lot of it was.. .we got
logs and framed it. Some of the old timber
we got from the Comstock. By then they had
started open pit mining up there. They would
dig into these old stopes, and it was easy to
get a lot of that old timber out of there. We
put that in for that caved-in set.
Bill Donovan got much of the mine
machinery and rails for the track and mining
cars and things like that. We put those in
there...and the liners and the stopers and the
jackhammer. I don’t think it all came from his
mine, but he knew lots of miners around, and
could get it.
Did you feel that you had enough time to
complete the mine if they wanted to open it on
Nevada Day of 1950?
Well, we had to do a little rushing on that. I
used to go up and work nights quite a bit of the
time, and work Sundays when nobody else was
there, to get the work done— especially on all
that painting of the rock, getting that figured
out and getting them painted. Thelma used to
help me. She came up and cast the hands for
the hoistmen, because they had to have them
on those controls. There was a lot of little ways
like that that she helped out on it.
Whose hands did she use for the mold?
Mine.
So you’re immortalized up there, then, huh?
[laughter]
Well, there’s a lot of us are. We had to make
face masks, you know. I had to make molds of
people’s faces. There’s quite a few people around
that are faces on the mannequins there. I don’t
know if we made some with Debs Longero
and.... I know Patricia’s hair is on one guy
up there—my daughter, a redhead. The guy
making primers in there was named Waldo,
somebody from the Santa Barbara museum.
Did you ever mold anything off of either Major
Fleischmann or Judge Guild?
No. I don’t think they’d have stayed quiet
enough for making a mold on their face, you
know.
Building the Mine Exhibit and Becoming Museum Director
During the construction of the mine exhibit,
was anything else being built? Were you
concentrating exclusively on the mine exhibit,
or was there some other activity underway in
the museum?
No. We worked exclusively on that,
practically; we didn’t do anything else.
With practically everybody who was there
working on that full time, how did you handle
the visitors who would come to see the exhibits
daily?
Well, the front door was open. They
could just go through the museum. There
wasn’t anything much to it then, except just
the old building. There was a museum right
across from the office, which is now the Coin
Room where the coins are. The dioramas were
around that room, and then all the heads
around that room were those of African
animals that the major had donated. There
was quite a bit of the Mineral Room there.
The big long room where we finally put in a
Paleontology Room was all a bird collection
from a lady in Fallon that did taxidermy work.
The major got a hold of that, and that was all
birds. And the annex running back from the
old building was all historical exhibits that
Dick and Tony had put in before I ever got
there. So there was some museum to see for
the tourists, but there was just the secretary in
the office there, and the tourists would come
in and go through the museum.
Were you ever called in front of the board to
discuss progress on the mine? Were you asked
to attend the board meetings or have any role
in that at all?
Not that I remember.
47
I’m tr ying get some idea of how the
administration of the museum worked.
They had a board there, but the major
and the judge had more of the say-so on
everything. The board would have their
meetings, but they never did call me in that I
recollect for any report or anything, because
any time they wanted to see what was going
on they could come right down and look!
[laughter] Which they all did, of course. So
as long as everything was going along and
making progress, and everybody seemed to
be happy, there was no need for me to go up
and make any report to them or anything like
that.
As I understand it, you were made supervisor
in 1950. I know that sometime in 1951 you
became the director of the museum. Would
that have been before or after the mine was
completed? Can you recall?
I can’t really recall whether I was supervisor
or director then when we opened the mine.
Do you recall whether or not your salary
changed with the change in title?
I think it did go up a little bit, because I
went on the state payroll when they made me
director.
And prior to that you had been paid by the
trustees out of Fleischmann money?
Mostly, yes. See, Major Fleischmann had
donated quite a block of Standard Brands
stock that they were getting quite an income
from, as well as the special things that he had
donated money for, like the mine and so forth.
So they had quite a little income that the state
48
James W. Calhoun
had nothing to do with. They could spend it
any way they wanted to.
Well, during that interim period then when
you were the supervisor, there must have been
nobody on the state payroll working in the
museum. Is that correct?
Well, I think the secretary was.
And the others were all on Fleischmann money?
Yes.
You were asked to take over the job of finishing
the mine, and you were made the supervisor in
order to do that. Obviously, becoming director
of the museum means somewhat of a change
in responsibilities. It’s no longer exclusively the
mine. Did they contact you about that? I don’t
even know who “they” would be.
Well, of course, as supervisor I was
taking care of the whole thing, too—seeing
that it was kept clean, and the janitor work
or anything that went wrong. When I took
over as director there really wasn’t much
change. I just kept doing the work there.
The only change was that instead of working
down in the mine, we were working up in the
galleries putting in exhibits.
I’m still a little vague about how you became
director, though. It would seem to me that
someone had to suggest it.
Well, I suppose the judge did...I don’t
know...at the board meeting.
He hadn’t discussed this with you?
Not that I can remember. The only thing
I remember is my wife and I talking over
whether I wanted to stay there, or whether
I wanted to go back in the construction
business, because I could make more money
in construction right at that time. But we
decided that maybe something steady would
be better, and so decided that I should take
it.
In 1949 the state legislature passed the act
permitting the museum to become a selfgoverning body and to carry on its work
through memberships, with trustees elected
from the membership. You had been here for
a couple of years at that time; do you recall
anything about the passage of that and how it
might have affected the way things were run
in the museum?
No, I don’t. It doesn’t seem to me that
anything changed much, because the way they
were operating, I think the legislature must
have just made it authentic.
*****
We opened the mine exhibit on Nevada
Day of 1950, and didn’t know how things
would work. I had plenty of people—I think I
had about 3 people down in the mine besides
the major. Another man was at the head of
the stairs, regulating the flow down into the
mine and letting probably 8 or 10 at a time go
through and then holding them up, because
there were so many went through that day
that it was quite a jam around there. The
major spent an awful lot of his time at the
exit, asking people how they liked it. The other
people around in the mine had quite a bit of
fun standing there real still. And with the
mannequins in the mine, why, people would
think they were another mannequin standing
there. One woman come up to Phil Orr, and
he almost scared her to death. She came real
Building the Mine Exhibit and Becoming Museum Director
close to his face, looking at him, to see if he
was real, and he started blinking his eyes, and
[laughs] scared her pretty much. Otherwise,
everything went fine.
Was the major dressed in a uniform?
Well, just his regular jacket that he wore
and his pistols.
He wore his pistols?
Oh, yes. Sure. He wore those all the time.
[laughter]
Judge Guild stayed upstairs in the office
greeting people. A lot of the old-timers came
in, and they were happy with the way things
went and that everybody was so pleased with
the thing.
We were working on the mine pretty
much till the day before opening to have
everything ready. I don’t remember any
troubles or anything about it.
We didn’t have any glass in any of the
exhibits at that time. We were trying to make
it look as authentic as possible, you know. But
we finally had to put in glass because of things
like.... There was a convention of bankers
in town here, and all the wives came to the
museum to see it and went down through
the mine. One of the staff came along while
they were down there, and one of the women
was inside that caved-in set passing out the
candlesticks and old spikes and things in there
as souvenirs to the rest of the gang. So we
found that with too many souvenir hunters,
we had to put glass in all the exhibits within
a year after the mine had opened.
Once the mine opened, it was considered
to be complete. It was pretty much the way it
still is. In fact, the mine exhibit is run down
a little bit right now. They haven’t kept up
some of the exhibits, like the black light in
49
the scheelite set—tungsten—where the people
could pull the handle down, and then the
incandescent light would go out and the black
light would go on and show all the tungsten
around in the rock. The lights in the little
model square set are out, and they haven’t
fixed that. Some things like that they haven’t
kept up very well; they got busy with all their
other exhibits. It’s one of those things where
it’s very seldom that anybody’ll even make a
tour through and see how things are.
Did you used to tour through regularly?
Yes, I used to. And, of course, the other
people did, too; they were real interested in
it. One time Walter Long was down there
doing some work, and these kids came
through and went on past him in toward the
back of the mine. He heard them plotting
a bunch of mischief back there, so he went
back and come around the corner, and the
kids took off out through the exit. O n e
of them got away, but Walter caught one
of them—took him by the coat collar and
marched him clear down Main Street to the
police station, which was in the basement of
the courthouse at that time—marched the
kid clear down the Main Street to the police
station!
What was he planning to do?
Oh, I don’t know. We had quite a bit
of trouble with kids defacing things down
there—taking a car off the track or anything
that they could think of to vandalize...scraping
the paint off the rocks, which showed the
plaster. We’d have to repair them.
The mine exhibit had quite an impact
over the years. We never did advertise it or
anything, but time and time again people
would say that they heard about it from some
50
James W. Calhoun
friend or relative: “You must stop in Carson
City and see that museum and the mine in the
basement.” So I’m sure that that was a great
drawing card for the museum.
Most of the upkeep required has been
because of vandalism. The only alteration
worth mentioning is...around the corner,
the first set that you come to is the man on
the liner. When they put the coin press in
upstairs and wanted to start using it, why, it
would be pounding so much that they went
down there and robbed part of that set to
put in extra posts under the floor to hold
the press upstairs. They also poured cement
to stand the pounding when the press was
operated.
Once the ceremony was completed and the
mine was opened, what did the museum staff
turn to next? Were you able to relax for a
while, or did you immediately take on a new
project?
Well, Debs had been working in the mine,
and there was no more work for him.O
f
course, I kept George Smith on as a building
supervisor, superintendent or something, to
take care of everything. And right after that
was when they sent me to Santa Barbara. I
was down there for a couple of weeks with
the preparators.
The trustees were all impressed with those
dioramas that the major had had made in
San Francisco with Cecil Tose. I was able to
convince them that we could make dioramas,
too. They gave me permission to hire a
taxidermist, and I hired Fred Holley. I think
he came from Arizona—originally from New
York—and he was a dandy. He could make
any animal or bird or anything look so natural
you’d swear it was alive. In fact, most of those
small critters up there in the cases were done
by Fred. At that time there was a 41-pound
cutthroat trout that had been the record that
was caught in Pyramid Lake. It was in a big,
plastic, tube-like jar full of formaldehyde.
It’d been in that for years, and just as hard
as a rock from the formaldehyde. Fred took
that out and worked with it, got it softened
up, took the skin off it, made the form and
mounted it. And it’s still up there as a display
in the exhibits.
Major Fleischmann died in 1951. Did that have
any immediate impact on the museum?
Not particularly that I remember, because
the Fleischmann Foundation took right over,
and we were getting funds from them every
year. So I don’t know if there was any great
change at all in anything.
Of course, you relied heavily upon him for
funding. Did you have any idea that the
foundation would continue the level of funding
that he’d established? You know, as it turns
out, they actually funded you for a far greater
amount than Major Fleischmann ever did
in his own lifetime. The foundation, I think,
eventually put up about three-quarters of a
million dollars for the museum in the period
from 1951 to the end of the 1960s, whereas
Major Fleischmann himself, from 1942 or so up
through 1951, had contributed about $80,000.
Ultimately, you didn’t suffer one bit, but I think
it would have been hard to predict that.
Well, that was up to the judge, of course,
and he was such a friend of the major’s, and
the major having such an interest in the
museum, why.... I made out budgets, as far
as that goes, and then we’d turn in a request
to them for the money.
Building the Mine Exhibit and Becoming Museum Director
We didn’t have much money for the
exhibits after the mine was completed, and
we wanted to fix up the Historical Room
upstairs. They just had old store cases from a
jewelry store that set right down on the floor.
They were no good for museum work, so I
started making bases for these that would
raise them up off the floor, so they’d be more
satisfactory for museum exhibits. We had no
money for lumber or anything; I salvaged
lumber from all over the old mint building—
old shelving they had in there, bins, and one
thing and another. It was all good lumber
because it was first-class pine that was run in
the sawmills up at Glenbrook, with very few
knots in it or anything else. It’d be high-priced
lumber these days. So that took up quite a bit
of time, with George and I working at that
for a while, till we started creating museum
departments. Then I hired Nancy Bordewich
as a technician, and she painted backgrounds
in the cases and dioramas.
We built all those new cases in the
Historical Room in the old annex. We put
in various exhibits, instead of like so many
historical societies in those days which would
just put out a string of items, probably 50
percent of them without any labels on what
they were. We segregated them; we didn’t try
to keep them in somebody’s special collection
and show the whole collection. We wanted to
show some part of the pioneer life. Then we
had a bunch of old dresses; we made regular
mannequins for those and then cast the
regular hands and faces of the women from
some of the crew. We put the old dresses on
those mannequins and had an exhibit of the
old dresses.
We were trying to get the inaugural
dresses of the various governors’ wives. Marge
Russell donated hers. We were going to make
moulage casts of their faces, and make wax
51
faces for the women. We had Marge Russell in
to put moulage all over her face, and we laid
her out there to make the mask. We found
out when she got through that she was just
scared to death and almost died in the whole
thing because it gave her claustrophobia. I
guess she had a very bad experience with the
whole thing. I think we got another dress or
so, but never were able to carry out the idea of
making masks of all these people and putting
them on display.
7
The Development of Research
and Teaching Missions
Winnemucca Lake Caves
Peggy Wheat [Margaret M. Wheat] is an
anthropologist who was already cooperating
with the museum when I came there. She was
a great friend of Dick Miller, who had been
the director before. So I just got acquainted
with her then, and she came in and reported
several things. Peggy came in one day in 1951
and reported some pothunters vandalizing
the caves out on the east side of Lake
Winnemucca. So the trustees got Phil C. Orr
up from the Santa Barbara Museum; he was
their archaeologist and paleontologist.
We went out there to see about it, and
were looking over the caves. Then coming
back from the caves we had to go up a draw
and around the north end of the lake. Going
up this draw, we met a car coming down, and
it was Marge and her husband—I can’t think
of their last name now. They were doing the
pothunting in the caves, coming over the
mountain there from Lovelock. So we sat in
the draw there—the wind blowing through
there; and it was awful cold that day—and
talked to them. Marge got out of her car with
a pistol when she met us. We talked to them
for quite a while there, and Phil was able to
convince them of the scientific value of the
thing. They finally agreed that the museum
could go ahead and excavate. Then they used
to come over and visit us and even had us over
once for dinner in Lovelock! [laughter]
The Bureau of Land Management
(BLM) was supposed to enforce the law on
pothunters. [The federal Preservation of
American Antiquities Act of 1906—ed.] They
wouldn’t do a thing; they had no interest in it
at all. And the highway department, we asked
them to report any finds on their excavating,
and they were afraid that we would stop
their progress. In fact, I know a contractor
out of Fallon that gave orders that any man
on his crew that reported anything would be
fired. And now the BLM has a whole crew
of archaeologists coming out in the paper
with all these wonderful discoveries they
have made—which is nothing but a repeat
of the discoveries that have already been
made by the regular archaeologists doing
54
James W. Calhoun
work here, clear from Mark Harrington and
Lewellyn L. Loud on through to what we did.
And the highway department also has their
archaeologists now.
Whose idea was it to bring Phil Orr over to
Nevada? Was that Major Fleischmann’s?
Yes, because he was acquainted with
the Santa Barbara Museum so much. And
he propositioned Mr. Arthur Coggeshall,
who was the director of the Santa Barbara
Museum. They loaned Phil to us for a couple
of summers. We just worked out there at Lake
Winnemucca in the summers, from 1952
through 1954.
I used to go out with Phil to work—take a
couple of weeks and work with him out there.
He had his wife, Mildred, out sometimes, and
one time I took Thelma out with me to get a
load of material that he had there. You had
to go around the north end of the old Lake
Winnemucca to get in there— over a little
pass that dropped into a dry wash that came
down to the lake, and go around the corner
there in the hillside to the caves. Up that dry
wash a ways was a line cabin for the cowboys
to use in their roundup, and we were staying
in that.
We got ready to leave next morning and
came down with Phil and Mildred, and we
split with them where we went over around
the north end of the lake. They went on down
to the caves to work. We got over the little pass
to the north end of the lake, and there had
been a cloudburst. I had this whole truckload
of mummies from the dig—4 or 5 of them in
the truck—and we’d come to a place about 3
or 4 feet wide and 1 to 2 feet deep, and I’d have
to knock down the banks and get the truck
down in it and follow that till I could get out.
We did that time and time again, got around
clear to where we would cross over to get on
the highway, and the whole playa there was
flooded with water. I was afraid to get out in
it, because it softens the playa within and you
get stuck. So we had to work the truck around
and work our way clear back up through all
of that.
We finally come over the pass late in the
afternoon, 4:00 or 5:00, and we’d started out at
9:00 that morning. We met Phil and Mildred
coming up from the dig, and went back up to
the cabin with them and had a cup of coffee.
We wanted to find out if there was another
way out. Well, the maps that Phil had ended
right the other side of this line cabin,sothere
was no way of knowing, but I knew that if
I headed east far enough, I could probably
come out on Highway 40. It was starting to
get dusk, and Thelma and I took off from
there with this load of mummies and went
up on top. Crossing over to the other range
you come to roads going in all directions. I
would just get out and study them and figure
out which way to go on it, that I would keep
the direction I wanted to go. So we’d take off
again.
We came to one place where the whole
road was covered with water coming down off
this gentle slope there. The water had washed
out gullies about a foot or so wide and a foot
or two deep, about 50 feet apart, and flooded
the road. It was getting dark, so I got up on
the side of the road and told Thelma to hang
on, and I revved up the pickup and started to
cross there, jumping each one of these ditches
[laughter] with those mummies bouncing
around in the back. Of course, I was hanging
on to the car, and I got across all of this layout
about the length of a football field, and I
looked over and Thelma is down on the floor
there with her hat off and pretty well messed
up. [laughter] But we got across it all right.
We went up, went over and we got to a
sign that said, “Rattlesnake Pass,” over Ragged
The Development of Research adn Teaching Missions
Top Mountain. We went over the top of that
and started down the gulch on the other side,
and that road was all washed out. You’d go
along where it was flat for a ways and then it’d
drop off about 4 feet and get down in there,
or ease the truck down and go down a ways
and there’d be another one. We got down there
quite a ways doing that. It was pitch dark then.
Finally there was a little string of lights way
off down over there in the valley, and Thelma
said, “What’s that?”
I said, “Well, if I’m right, that’s one of the
passenger trains going through.” And it was.
So we got down in the bottom there and hit
Highway 40 and came on in. We got in about
1:30 that night, after starting out at 9:00 in the
morning on a trip that usually took about 2
1/2 hours. [laughter)
What condition were the mummies in?
It didn’t seem to hardly hurt them any.
We’d packed them well. [laughter) They rode
all right on all of that.
I think it was about 3 years that we went
on with that particular dig. We had a couple of
Indian boys working for us out there one year,
and one of them was pretty good at making
points. Thelma was out there with me, and we
were getting everything ready to bag it up, and
this kid came to Thelma: “I don’t know what
to do.” He had made a little effigy—carved it
out of the tufa and tossed it into the rocker.
[A rocker is a device used by archaeologists to
separate objects from the dirt, sand or detritus
in which they may be found.—ed.] Phil Orr
got ahold of this thing and he was all excited,
because nobody had ever found the Paiutes
making one of those things before! [laughter]
The kid come to Thelma and he didn’t know
what the hell to do, because he didn’t want
Phil to go on thinking it was authentic, but
he didn’t want to tell him. Finally she had to
55
alert Phil to what the kid had been doing.
[laughter] He made real good points, too, just
as good as any you’d find out there.
One year out there the National
Geographic Society co-sponsored the dig
with us and put up some of the money. They
sent a man out there to take pictures, and
he stayed with us for quite a while. He had
cameras hanging around his neck and was
shooting pictures of everything. But evidently
they decided not to use it, because nothing
ever came of it. They never did have it in the
magazine.
We found a lot of interesting things
all right, and Phil put out a couple of
little pamphlets on it. But one of my big
disappointments was that I could never get
him to write up a good report on the thing.
He was always delaying; he wanted more
information and so forth, and we had some
good dates on the radiocarbon dates on
the layout. Wally [Wallace] Broecker of the
Lamont Geological Observatory at Columbia
University was with us out there. He was very
interested in it and was doing the carbon 14
dating for us. We had dates that took us back
around the 10,000 year figure. See, that tufa
is formed by an alga, so it was organic, and
he could date that, too. And he was dating
the different levels of the old Lake Lahontan
with the carbon 14 dating, so that we knew
the dates there, too. It would have been a
pretty good feather in our cap if I could’ve
gotten out a good publication on the whole
thing, but Phil seemed to be kind of reluctant.
Phil wasn’t a college graduate or anything—a
self-made archaeologist and so forth. He and
some other fellows in California had been
suggesting this 10,000 to 12,000 year date for
man coming into the North American
continent, and the established archaeologists
at universities were pooh-poohing the idea—
like Robert F. Heizer and those fellows. [Dr.
56
James W. Calhoun
Robert F. Heizer was acknowledged to be
the leading archaeologist of western North
America. Raised in Lovelock, Nevada, he was
on the faculty at Berkeley in 1950 when he
began substantial research into the prehistory
of Nevada and the Great Basin.—ed.]Heizer
just figured on about 4,000 years ago that man
came in across the Bering Strait. It would have
been a feather in our cap to get it published on
that early date, and then he delayed it so damn
long that finally Texas came out with the date
ahead of us. [laughter] There wasn’t any use in
it—Phil never did publish. He wanted me to
take over on this, and that’s one of the reasons
that I started up the Truman-Orr Foundation.
[See Appendix.]
Phil didn’t know what to do with the
money remaining in the Western Speleological
Society fund after his stroke. I wrote to him
and was going to resign from the Western
Speleological deal, but he wanted me to
hang on. So the best thing I could come up
with for the money that was left—about
$81,000—was to set up this foundation and
name it after Truman, who donated most of
the original money, and Phil—the TrumanOrr Foundation. We went ahead and hired an
attorney and we elected Thelma as a member,
too. See, there was only Phil and I left of the
whole layout. Judge Guild and Coggeshall had
died, and Julius Bergen resigned, so Phil and
I were the only ones left.
We needed 3 to carry on the business, so
we elected Thelma. I got an attorney and had
him set up the whole thing and change it to
the foundation through telephone meetings
with Phil. Then we started getting the funds
that he had invested in Santa Barbara banks
as they would mature. He had them mostly
in certificates of deposit and as they would
mature we had them transferred up here. We
only have one left now to transfer. It comes
early next year.
We set it up so that we can make donations
out of the income. The first year, we had about
$6,000 accumulated that we could use. I hit
up the museum on them giving us an estimate
on what they wanted to do and how they
could use it. Once before when Phil started
telling me all this stuff, he wanted to send up
the material he had down at Santa Barbara
for study—some mummies and an awful
lot of basketry and everything else that we’d
excavated. I sent Don Tuohy down to get it.
We set up a program to study all this material
and number it and catalog it, and they’re
going to put it in the computer. Tuohy hired
a graduate student from Oregon, and got all
of that done. And then the next year, we had
about $10,000 accumulated, so he wanted to
finish this cataloging and computer deal and
prepare it for publication. That’s what they’re
doing now with that money—Early Man in
Nevada.
An Emerging Operational Philosophy
At first I didn’t attend the museum board
meetings. It was quite a while before they
wanted me to attend the meetings and report.
The judge did all the reporting.
That’s interesting. I wasn’t aware of that.
I’ve made an assumption that I probably
shouldn’t have made, which was that a board
meeting would necessarily have the director
of the museum present. When did you begin
attending those board meetings?
I have no idea just when. It must have been
in the 1960s, someplace through there, that I
finally started attending.
You may not have had very much to do with
that end of things in the 1950s, but obviously
you had an important role in determining the
The Development of Research adn Teaching Missions
priorities of the museum. How active was Judge
Guild in trying to determine what the museum
should be doing from year to year?
Well, the judge had some ideas from
having seen the Santa Barbara Museum and
some others, of course, but after we got going
and he got the faith in me, why, there wasn’t
any trouble much on it. Once in a while, when
I would propose something.. .see, I always
took up anything with the judge, because he
was right there all the time after he retired
from the bench. He had his office there, and
so I’d always talk things over with him. Once
in a while, he would say, “Well.... I don’t
know.” So I would just go on and let it go for
a while, and then possibly I’d come in to talk
to him sometime, and he’d say, “Jim, I’ve been
thinking, now, we should do this and that,”
and [laughs] so we’d have it come through
all right.
He’d just go ahead and tell you to do what you
had already wanted to do? [laughing]
It was his idea, then, see. So it would
work out all right, anyway. So the judge
and I got along fine. I didn’t care about any
of the publicity. He got all of that on any of
the exhibits that went in. We had hired Guy
Shipler to do the PR stuff, to make out the
releases for the paper. Of course, the judge was
always credited with everything, which is the
way it should be because if it hadn’t been for
him there wouldn’t be such a thing up there!
So we got along fine. He just depended on me
to go ahead and get everything done. I had
had so much experience in so many different
things that I could make plans and draw the
plans up architecturally and make estimates
on costs and everything like that. It took a
lot of weight off his shoulders, and we always
came out all right on it.
57
During the 1950s our most important
effort was trying to get all these scientific
departments started. Archaeology and
biology were the 2 departments that I wanted
to keep going more than anything else. Now,
I had pressure put on me to start a geology
department. One guy that was working for me
there, George Wilson, had a degree in geology.
He wanted to start a geology department,
but they had that over at the university; why
should I start it here? Another fellow wanted
me to start up mineralogy. Of course, we had
lots of minerals, but I figured I could get in
an expert from the university or someplace
to take care of the mineral part of it, the
identification and that. Why start up a whole
department?
Mining companies had put up money
for a mineral exhibit in the early days. The
minerals were already there; all we did was
put in better specimens if we acquired some,
like that. We just wanted the minerals mostly
for exhibit, or available for somebody if they
wanted to come in and study them, but we
didn’t need a new department in that. So I
figured our money should go to keep the
biology, archaeology and exhibit departments
going. That was enough for us for quite a
while, and that’s still all they have going,
practically.
The decision to bring in some trained research
professionals, such as Phil Orr and later Dr.
Richard Shutler, was a decision that changed
the thrust of the museum from what it had
been before—from primarily a building in
which to exhibit things that had been collected
by other people into a combination of an
exhibit area and a research environment.
That’s a rather important decision. Can you
think back and recall any of the discussions
that may have taken place surrounding that?
Tell me something about who decided that
58
James W. Calhoun
was the course that ought to be taken by the
museum.
Well, I’m not much on tooting my own
horn, but.... Of course, I hadn’t been in
museums or anything before going down to
Santa Barbara and seeing that one and what
the exhibits were. My impression then was
that a museum should be a place of research
and education as well as just showing the
exhibits. I had learned from seeing other
museums and going to museum conferences,
talking to people, that a museum, rather than
just being a dull place with exhibits, should
do a lot of research work and supply a lot of
services—educational mostly. That’s what I
started to aim for, and I think the museum
was developing pretty much on the idea that
I had for it from the start.
Judge Guild and Clara Beatty, director of
the Nevada Historical Society, were kind of
on the outs all the time. Clara thought that
the museum was going ahead too much,
and the major was putting up money for the
museum and said that he wouldn’t give the
Historical Society a damn thing. Then the
judge was claiming that Clara should keep
her nose out of the museum business...so
things weren’t very good there. My idea was
to have the Historical Society be the main
institution for history, and the museum go in
more to the scientific end of it—the biology
and the archaeology and all of that.
Of course, the Historical Society had
received quite a few artifacts from the
excavation of Lovelock Cave by the University
of California. Every time we’d come out
with some press releases on our digs at
Winnemucca Cave or someplace, why, Clara’d
come out with some of her collection over
there from Lovelock Cave. By that time some
of that information was wrong—the scientists
had changed ideas on it—but she’d still print
it in the paper! [laughs] You know, like the
giant Indians and the red-headed Indians and
all of that. Well, there wasn’t any giants; there
might be an extra tall fellow once in a while,
like there is in any bunch of people. And as
far as the red-headed Indians, in those dry
caves and with the chemical changes black
hair turns red. So that was the red-headed
Indians! [laughter]
Of course, I couldn’t come right out and
take sides or anything, but the crew of the
Historical Society were good friends with
me, see. We cooperated back and forth a
lot, unbeknownst to Clara and the judge, I
guess. [laughter] I don’t know how it come
about, but even before Clara and the judge
died, we finally got so that we could help
them out and build some exhibits for them.
So we were happy to go ahead and do that.
We wanted to help out. We also helped out
the Elko museum, made the exhibit cases for
them, put together exhibits.
The Mobile Museum
One of the ideas that was put forward in that
period that bore fruit in 1953 was the idea of
a mobile museum. Who thought that one up?
Well, Thelma and I pretty much. We’d
been to several museum conferences, and
we saw these little deals where they just
had a little van fixed up to probably take to
schools around the cities, you know. So we
got the idea with the far-flung schools all
over Nevada here that if the museum could
take a part of the museum to the schools, it
would be educational. I got the dimensions
on a house trailer, what it would be, and
drew up the plans for the cases in it and
talked it over with the judge. He was all for
it.. .anything that we could get the word of
the museum around the state. Then he was
The Development of Research adn Teaching Missions
always interested in the education of the kids,
too.
They gave me permission to go ahead
with it. I went down to Los Angeles, where
there were several outfits building trailers, and
I found one, a Columbia something-or-other,
who would take a unit off the assembly line
and then work on it special, putting in the
cases and so forth. I made a deal with them,
and they made the mobile unit and brought
it up to us. We had a station wagon, and we
put a hitch on that and started out.
I got Mike Shaughnessy to take it to the
schools in Reno for a trial run of it. It worked
good. So then I looked around for a fellow
that could handle an outfit like that, hauling
the trailer around and backing it in to places
and things, you know.I got Pete Herlan, and
Pete took the job; he was on a concrete gang
there working for a contractor. He came to
work, took the mobile unit around the state.
I found out that Pete had a degree in
biology from the University of Washington.
That gave me the idea of us getting the biology
department started. So when Pete got through
with his run for the season on the mobile unit,
we started planning for a biology department.
Pete was all enthusiastic about that, of course.
So that’s the way that one originated.
Later on, when it come to they were
busing all the kids into consolidated schools
and everythingin the late 1960s, and the
mobile unit wasn’t of much use any more, we
hit on this idea of making loan cases for the
schools—small, portable cases that could be
sent around. We tried them out in the schools
up here, and the teachers went for them in a
big way. We had over 100 made up.
Recruiting Benefactors
It must have cost quite a bit of money to put
the mobile unit together. Did money have to
59
be raised specially, or did the Fleischmann
Foundation pick up the tab? Did Judge Guild
go out and raise money?
I think it came mostly out of foundation
funds, although Judge Guild was always trying
to find ways to get people to donate to the
museum. The boards of trustees generally
went along with what the judge wanted to
do, so he was instrumental in appointing
the members of the board. He tried to get
these fellows that had lots of connections
with the public, like Tom Wilson with all his
advertising and Joe Wells with his transfer
outfit and William Peccole in Las Vegas had
a lot of influence and Clayton Phillips with
his insurance companies—people like that,
that he thought might interest some of their
clients in leaving a bequest in their will to
the museum when they died or something
like that, see. Not a one of them ever come
through with anything. That was one of his
big disappointments.
Even though you were not attracting a
lot of private donors, apparently you were
comfortable in the belief that annually the
Fleischmann Foundation would subsidize
the museum to a degree that would make
operations and progress possible. Is that correct?
Yes, we were pretty confident of it all the
time— especially with the judge alive and
doing all the PR work on it. I had nothing
much to do with that except making out the
overall budget for the state presentation, and
then the budget for all of our scientific work,
of course. We would ask the foundation for so
much of that sum. For some of the archaeology
work we got grants from the National Science
Foundation, things like that. But that was up to
the department head, like Richard Shutler, to
make out the request and send it in. It would
60
James W. Calhoun
just have to be signed by the director or the
chairman of the board or something.
The judge did run across old Carl Jacobsen
in Ely and got him interested in the museum.
Carl left quite a bunch of money to the museum
after his wife finally died, but that’s the only
one that ever came through with anything. He
made Carl a trustee, you know, after that. He
was on the board for quite a while.
Oh, Carl donated the money first and then was
made a trustee?
Well, he gave us a lot of his collection
over there first—a lot of minerals and Indian
artifacts and one thing and another. He got
interested good that way. I went over and
picked up all the material from him, and
they were very nice people. Had breakfast
with them before we’d leave in the morning,
and old Carl would always come out with
his aquavit, that Danish drink...something
like tequila, you know, just hotter than
hell! [laughs] Have a shot before breakfast!
[laughter] And then the judge put Carl on the
board, and he’d always make it over for the
board meetings. Poor old guy died of cancer
later in Salt Lake.
do anything except the taxidermy work there.
The exhibit technicians did all the exhibit
work and dioramas and everything like that.
Fred just mounted all the animals and birds
and went out and collected them and so forth.
I think it was just a kind of a title when we first
started there that we gave him in that report.
That suggests, then, that there was no orderly
approach to research into the animal life of
Nevada. One gets the impression that there was
a kind of comprehensive effort to collect animal
life from all over the state.
Well, there was.
Who directed that? If Mr. Holley were just
the taxidermist, he would hardly be the one, I
think, to direct something like that, would he?
Well, he didn’t direct it or anything; he was
pretty much on his own on collecting the stuff
that was needed, because we didn’t want to
collect more than was needed. Fred just kind
of judged that himself and went out and did
quite a bit of collecting. Pete Herlan did a lot
of the bird collecting for him after he started
in as the curator of biology.
Collecting Nevada Wildlife
Specimens
Did either of them ever run afoul of any state
or federal laws concerning what animals can
be collected and cannot?
Another area in which the museum became
active right around 1953 and 1954 was in the
collecting of bird, mammal, insect and fish
life and so forth. I believe that you hired a
Frederick Holley, who had formerly been with
Syracuse University, and made him curator of
mammalogy and ornithology about that time.
No. We always got permission from
whatever state or federal department had
charge of it. We got permission from the feds
to take an antelope, and Pete and I went up to
the Shelton Antelope Refuge. The ranger there
took us out to it in his 4-wheel-drive vehicle,
and we got a good buck antelope that day;
brought it back for mounting in the museum.
Also, when Phil was here we were making
the survey and taking a lot of samples of the
Fred Holley? Well, we just gave Fred a title.
He was a taxidermist, and he didn’t actually
The Development of Research adn Teaching Missions
tufa to send back to Wally Broecker at the
Lamont Geological Observatory of Columbia
University. We wanted to get samples of the
tufa on Anaho Island out there. Nobody’s
allowed on there on account of it’s a big
rookery for the pelicans and cormorants
and gulls. The fish and game man took us
across in his boat to the island, and we got
to go all over the island taking samples of
tufa on the different levels. They always
cooperated with us, whatever we wanted
to do—all these departments, except the
highway department—on archaeology and
paleontology.
Excavations at Lost City
In the mid-1950s there was a study of Lost City,
Pueblo Grande, guided by Dr. Richard Shutler.
It was sponsored in part by the Nevada State
Museum, wasn’t it?
Yes. I’d kind of forgotten all about that,
and I don’t remember too much about it now.
I think that’s when I really got acquainted with
Dick Shutler. He had taken on this deal with
the Park Service and, I guess, the Valley of Fire
and Lost City. The museum cooperated as they
could, and just what it was, I don’t remember.
That’s when I really got acquainted with Dick,
and then hired him as the archaeologist for the
museum afterward. He was at the University
of Arizona at that time.
I was hoping you’d be able to remember a little
bit about this. It seems to me from the reading
that I’ve done that this is the first major move
into southern Nevada by the Nevada State
Museum—your making a real effort to do some
work of importance to that part of the state as
well as to the north.
Yes.
61
Was there any effort prior to that that you can
think of that...?
No. Not that I know. The next big one was
the Tule Springs dig.
Was there any interest on the part of the people
of Las Vegas in having this done? Can you
recall if you were contacted by either citizens
or legislators, or...?
No, I can’t. It couldn’tve been too important
to the museum here at that time, because I
can’t remember very much about the actual
work or anything.
What eventually happened to the material
that was collected? Did it go to the Lost City
Museum, or did it come up here to the State
Museum? Do you have anything here?
I haven’t any idea. Most of it probably went
to the Lost City Museum there, because it was
in connection with that, I guess. R. F. “Chick”
Perkins was there all the time with that. He
was head of that, and if he had anything to do
with it, why, then there wasn’t anything come
to the museum, because he didn’t like Judge
Guild. [laughter]
In the State Archives there i s s ome
correspondence between Perkins and others
that suggests there may have been some tension
between him and the State Museum.
Well, there really wasn’t any great
animosity of the museum against the Lost
City Museum, per se, but Perkins was always
very jealous of his job there. He wasn’t a
real archaeologist or anything. He and his
father had cooperated with Mark Raymond
Harrington when Harrington did the studies
and excavations of the Lost City deal way
62
James W. Calhoun
back in the Depression. They worked with
Harrington, and they went out on their own—
he and his father—and collected all kinds of
artifacts all over the place. All the regular
archaeologists called them pothunters. Chick
was no doubt sensitive on that score and he
had this museum going, using all the artifacts
that they had gathered. He was naturally
a little afraid of anything like the Nevada
Museum getting ahold and taking over there.
Of course, Perkins didn’t like Judge Guild
at all either. I have no idea what the out was
there—whether he had something particular
against him, or whether he just thought the
judge was going to try and take over the Lost
City Museum. The judge had no intention of
doing so that I ever knew of. We were willing
to cooperate with Chick and everything. In
fact, Thelma and I stopped there a couple of
times on our various trips and made real good
friends with him. The only thing that I could
figure out was that he was just naturally afraid
that a bigger outfit like the museum would
take over and he would lose out. Well, it could
happen, you know! He had the rights to that
kind of a fear on it, I guess. So he wanted to
keep in with the Clark County legislators to
prevent anything like that, which was only
natural on his part.
We really had no interest at that time on
taking over or anything, because we didn’t
have the funds to branch out too much. We
were developing the museum here, and the
various departments were taking all the funds
we had. We had no ambition on advancing
that fast all over the state. Later, when Clark
County started getting so influential and had
so many people and legislators, then the board
decided that something should be done about
more interest in Las Vegas and trying to get
their cooperation. The judge put in a bill at the
legislature to start up a branch in Las Vegas.
It went through the assembly and passed
through the senate, through the committee,
come out on the floor, and some guy got up—
and it was near the end of the session—and
he said, “Oh, that’s just going to cost us more
money.” And they killed it! [laughter] So that’s
as far as that went. But as far as Lost City was
concerned, we never did have any plans on
taking that over or anything like that, as far
as I know here.
Eventually, Perkins did get the state to buy
all that collection of his there, and they paid
him a big sum of money for it. It made a lot
of the archaeologists pretty sore that the state
would pay a bunch of money for artifacts that
had been gathered by an individual without
any authority or anything else, you know. But,
as I say, Chick got in pretty good standing
with Clark County legislators and was able
to swing things the way he wanted to, which
came out all right for him.
Your recollection now is that you probably met
Dick Shutler, or at least began to admire his
work, as a consequence of this joint project?
Yes. Since you mentioned it, I think that
was it. I had kind of forgotten how I did get
on to Dick, but that was it, all right.
E stablishing the Archaeol o gy
Department
There was a great deal of archaeological
work going on at the State Museum in the
period 1959-1960. I believe you founded
the archaeology department in 1959, with
a grant from the Fleischmann Foundation.
Was it necessary to have that grant before
establishing the department, or can you tell me
what the linkage between the money and the
establishment of a department was?
The Development of Research adn Teaching Missions
Well, it was essential to have it, of course,
because the state wouldn’t put up any money
for anything like that. We would put it in our
budget that we submitted to the foundation.
We had originally taken the museum board
and Julius Bergen of the Fleischmann
Foundation out to the Winnemucca Lake
caves and showed them everything that was
going on, and they got quite interested in
archaeology then. They went right along with
the deal—starting up a department and hiring
an archaeologist. So I hired Dick Shutler
then. Dick was a very good organizer and
believed in going around to different people
and places himself and bargaining with them
and setting up programs and getting advice.
So the archaeology took off with a bang! And
we did an awful lot of work around the state
and different places.
Tell me something about the working
relationship that existed between Dr. Shutler
and Phil Orr.
Well, after I got Dick, there wasn’t any
need for Phil to come up from Santa Barbara,
so the only time he came up would be when
we had a meeting of the Western Speleological
Institute. That was where we were studying
those limestone caves over in eastern Nevada.
Of course, Dick wouldn’tve gone along with
Phil very much. He was like the rest of the
college graduates! [laughter] But, he never
did say anything much about Phil, as far as
that goes.
Was he reluctant to accept the date of 10,000
years?
No, he was pretty open on that. He didn’t
have any firm ideas on it, but he was willing
to go along on the dates that you would get.
63
And the Tule Springs dig down there later
on.. .why, that was one of the main reasons for
that. An early geological survey down there
by the Southwest Museum had found what
they thought were hearth fires of some kind. I
don’t remember the details of it, but they had
put an early date on it. I don’t remember just
what the date was either. The idea of going
down there to the Tule Springs dig was to see
if we could confirm that date or even push it
back. It turned out that we didn’t find very
much after all that work, but that’s another
story.
Approximately at the time of Shutler’s hiring
in 1959, perhaps in conjunction with it, the
Nevada State Museum anthropological papers
were initiated.
Oh, yes. Because with him there we could
get publications out. We had no way to get
publications out before. I couldn’t write up the
publications, because I wasn’t an archaeologist
or anything like that. It had to be someone
that could write it up, and first you have to
have all the people doing the studying and the
cataloging, and get all the information before
you can publish. Of course, that’s what Dick
did. He had to set up a crew, and he knew how
to organize them and how to oversee all this
cataloging andidentification and so forth, and
then you can write up a report on it.
Did you find that he was a little bit more active
in that regard than Phil Orr?
Oh, yes. In fact, Dick was all for putting
out as much publication as you can, because
in those circles that’s the way to get to be
known. Of course, there’s always been quite
a bit of interest in Great Basin archaeology
from other students around the country.
64
James W. Calhoun
Did the publications have any effect on the way
that the legislature thought about the museum?
Oh, I can’t say that I noticed any difference
that way much. We were getting a little more
attention all the time, of course, because
we were expanding into so many areas and
getting known, but it was just about the time
I left there that there started being more
interest in museums and the work they were
doing. The Clark County delegation got more
interested in it, and then it seemed to have
been easier to get money out of the legislature
for some of this stuff.
Well, in 1959-1960, it seems almost as if the
legislature was losing interest in the museum.
Apparently they had cut out the funding for the
biennial reports.
Yes. They did that to all the agencies. An
awful lot of the agencies used to put out these
biennial reports, because the legislature met
every 2 years, so it was for the legislature’s
information. But the legislature decided that
it wasn’t worth the cost of all these agencies
putting out reports. They could have the
administrators of the agencies up before
them and question them and get the report
from them. And so they cut it out in all the
agencies—not just us.
But the museum decided, I guess, to go ahead
and do something anyway.
Well, one year we did. The board was
pretty disappointed when they dropped
that, because they liked that report—not
only for the legislature, but the foundation,
too, and for other people. So, that year they
decided to put them out among themselves.
They published a pamphlet called Twenty
Years of Development and Progress at the
Museum rather than a report that year. Then
we started putting out these guides to sell in
the shop. They went over pretty big, because
it showed just what was in the museum and
how to get around. We always believed in
the publications; the best way to keep your
accomplishments before the lawmakers and
the public and everything else is to put out
publications.
Space Shortages and the Guild Annex
By the late 1950s we were very short
on space after getting all these different
various departments started and having
considerably more crew. There was an old
annex to the regular mint building that
extended out the back of what had been
the boiler room, and it had a little attic on
it. This little attic was between the second
floor, where our Historical Room was, and
the bottom floor where the boiler was. The
archaeology department was working in
one small room downstairs there and then
up in this attic with their collections, and
the taxidermist was in the room in the back.
You couldn’t stand upright in some places.
The rest of the crew just had to work around
wherever they could. They had no regular
workshops or anything else. So we were pretty
short on space. In one of the annual reports
you’ll notice that practically the whole
thing is devoted to showing pictures of the
cramped spaces that the crew were working
in. [laughter] The fellow taking care of all
the minerals and the geology and doing the
exhibit work, too—exhibit technician—had
a cubbyhole down in the basement of the
mint building on the wrong side of the boiler
room, and he had all the minerals set up
down there in cases that we made. They were
just crowded together and doing the best that
they could.
The Development of Research adn Teaching Missions
65
Did the crowding have any noticeable effect
on the work?
the easiest way—to go by what information I
had and work it out.
Oh, yes. It would, naturally. When we
wanted to put in exhibits or anything like that,
practically all the work had to be done up
in the galleries, even with the galleries open
with the public going through. Sometimes it
was more interesting to the population going
through, though, to watch the crew working
there putting in the exhibits. But that’s why
we were touting for new annexes there, to get
the room for the people to work.
In 1957 the legislature added $100,000 to
$50,000 that they had allocated the session
before for the new wing to the museum, and
the Fleischmann Foundation contributed
$70,000. At that time the trustees voted to
name the new annex the Judge Clark J. Guild
Hall.
In the case of the Guild Annex, did you have
another model to go by?
What participation did you and the staff have
in the planning for the new wing?
I did the rough architectural drawing
for a floor plan on both of the annexes, and
then it would be turned over to the State
Planning Board—Hancock and his crew.
They would go to work on it and make
modifications if they had to, architecturally,
for the engineering and so forth, and come
up with the final plans. But on all the cases
and on the mobile unit and everything, I drew
out the plans myself. I didn’t know a hell of
a lot about manual art or about drawing the
plans or anything, just would go from other
plans and so forth—the same way with a lot
of the things for law changing and one thing
and another. I’d just do like the attorneys
do—they take somebody else’s and adapt to
theirs by changing the wording some. The old
judge told me once that I should have been
an attorney! [laughter] Well, I found that was
No, just a space that was available in that
yard there, and had to figure it out. It’s a
regular oblong box—2 stories and then break
it up into the galleries, figure out what you
wanted them for.
You hadn’t looked at floor plans from other
museums, then, to give you some guide?
No. No.
Were you given the number of square feet in
which you had to work to begin with? What I’m
getting at is, were there any budgetary pressures
that you had to...?
No. That had to be figured out by the State
Planning Board after they got the plans, and
they’d figure out about what the cost would
be.
So you were more or less free to begin with to
draw up whatever you felt you needed?
Yes.
Were the final plans put together by the State
Planning Board after you had given them your
suggestions more or less in conformation with
what you had in mind?
Yes. It come out pretty close to it most of
the time. On the Guild Hall they didn’t have
money enough to put in the elevator. We had
a space there for it in the corner, but they built
the building without one. Then after that was
built, Mr. Bergen, the head of the Fleischmann
66
James W. Calhoun
Foundation, appropriated $20,000 more for
an elevator to go in there, mainly on account
of the judge with his bad leg. Well, that’s one
of the excuses he gave, anyway.
We filled the Guild Annex up pretty quick,
but when we got that we had more work
space, mainly in the basement. Then we were
able to set up a regular carpenter shop and
hire a carpenter for building cases, and we
had an area for the exhibit crew to work. We
had a little area set aside for a photography
darkroom, and we had a couple of restrooms
in there—men and women—for the crew to
use, which we hadn’t had before. They had
had to go upstairs to the public one, so it
relieved us of a great deal. Then when we got
the Calhoun Annex, that helped out on the
storage. We set aside the whole basement on
that one for storage for the archaeological
material and the history material and other
things that we wanted to keep in storage bins
there and handy.
I’m curious as to whether the pressures that
were brought on the museum by storage
problems and space problems affected your
collection policies in any way.
Ho. It was a big problem to take care of
things as they came in, but we didn’t turn
down things on that account or anything. In
1959 we had this big collection of birds from
Mrs. Mills of Fallon, who was a taxidermist
and had given her collection to the museum.
In fact, Major Fleischmann, I think, talked
her into doing that. It was in a room in the
old mint building there—a big long case full
of the birds. So when we got the Guild Hall
we had a bird room in the Guild Hall, and we
moved all the birds down there and used this
long case in the old mint building to set up
the paleontology exhibit.
In that year, Ralph Preston of Altadena,
California was up at Lake Tahoe. Thelma
was co-chairman with Katherine Mackay
Hawkins of the art exhibit for the 1959 Silver
Centennial, and she was a member of the
commission. Ralph was an exhibitor, and
Thelma took him to the museum where
he met the judge. The centennial was in
Virginia City. Ralph was impressed with the
judge. He was a sculptor, and he made a tine
bust of Judge Guild that was presented to
the museum. Then in 1960 Shutler’s crew
excavated rock shelters east of Fallon in the
Humboldt and Carson sinks. And, of course,
with the construction of Guild Hall the crew
was kept pretty busy there for quite a while
building cases and filling up the 4 galleries
with exhibits. It was quite a job in itself to get
things out of storage and set up these exhibits.
The crew kept pretty busy. In fact, we had all
of them working on it.
You had some plans for a new Indian gallery
at that time, too, didn’t you?
Yes, that was one of the galleries upstairs.
All of the upstairs we turned into the
archaeology/anthropology department for all
the Indian exhibits. And in the downstairs we
had one side of natural history for animals,
and the other side for birds. And, as I say, we
had all the crew working on cabinets, whether
they were head of the department or not. The
only one we never could get in on that was
Shutler, and he wasn’t going to have anything
to do with putting in exhibits. [laughter] He’d
give advice and so forth on the artifacts and
that, but the crew had to do it. But all the rest
of the crew—Pete Herlan and everybody else;
the heads of departments, or whatever—were
working on putting in exhibits. A lot of that
was deadline work, getting ready for the
The Development of Research adn Teaching Missions
dedication of the Guild Hall, just like we did
the mine.
Did Shutler ever give you a reason for not
participating?
I don’t think he knew anything about it,
much, as far as that goes. And I don’t think
Dick was too handy mechanically or anything
like that. But the rest of them all were, and
they dug in and even worked overtime and
weekends sometimes to get the whole thing
done. The museum deal...you had to have
an awful interest in it, because you didn’t
get much money and you didn’t get paid
overtime. [laughter]
During your administration as director, was
there ever again as serious a space problem as
the one that you encountered in the late 1950s?
No. We were pretty well fixed on space
after we got the Guild Annex, and then
when we got the Calhoun Annex it was a real
bonanza.
We had so much more exhibit
space upstairs, and then the storage space and
office space, workrooms downstairs.
Then the highway department built the
big new highway department building. They
had a couple of Quonset huts in the building
down there where the Carson City mall
is now, in that triangle of the roads there. They
built that other building over there and had all
that yard space that they have now. They had
2 Quonset huts that they were using for their
equipment and so forth. These, they gave to
the school district, but the judge made a deal
with the district to have the huts turned over
to the museum in 1963. We got a house mover
to come and move them, and the highway
department gave us a corner in their lots over
there. We moved the 2 Quonset huts over and
67
had quite a bit of storage space. One large one
we used for the storage space for the large
historical items. We had the old buggies and
wagons there, and then built a lot of shelves
in there for holding all the historical items
that we’d acquired. And the other small one,
we made into a storage and workshop for the
archaeology department.
Falcon Hill, Lahontan Lake Levels
and a Severe Injury
In 1960 we completed the excavation of
10 caves at Falcon Hill at the north end of Lake
Winnemucca. It had been reported to us by
a fellow named William Shinners. They were
falconers and were looking for eagle nests up
there on the hill, and they discovered these
caves and reported them. There were lots of
artifacts and things they found there, but one
of the more interesting things was the upper
and lower jaw of a shrub ox. They’re an extinct
Pleistocene animal. There’ve been quite a few
found in caves in northern California, but
that’s the first one, and, as far as I know, the
only one ever found in Nevada.
In 1961 Dick Shutler and a man named
Bruno Sabels were interested in the levels of
the old Lake Lahontan. There’s a big mountain
there with these layers of tufa on up for the
different levels of old Lake Lahontan. We
climbed up that, and Sabels wanted some
samples of it, so I went on up with Dick’s little
kid. Sabels and Dick were waiting down by the
truck. We were coming back down, and we
came to a bunch of the tufa. There was a dropoff of about 4 feet, but you could go around
that on a gentler slope. But the little kid clung
there and hopped down this 4 feet, and so I
came up, hopped down there, too, and hit my
leg on a boulder that slipped out from under
me. It hurt like heck. I tried to stand up, and I
68
James W. Calhoun
couldn’t put any weight on that leg. Dick and
Sabels come up and helped me down the hill,
hopping on one leg, got me in the truck and
brought me in.
Thelma made a date with the doctor to
meet me. He set me down in a chair and took
the leg like this, and the whole leg just came
loose at the knee joint. It tore all the ligaments
loose there. I had to have an operation the
next day, and so I was in a cast for quite a while
with that leg. I carried on from the hospital
bed; the secretary’d bring correspondence
up and take the dictation down, and the
department heads would come up and see
me with their problems. Finally it come time
for a board meeting, and all the board come
up and had the meeting in my hospital room!
[laughter]
I went back to work with a cast on and
the crutches, and finally the cast come off and
I had to use a cane for quite a while. Then I
got rid of the cane, but I had a limp all the
time. I couldn’t do any more work out in the
hills, because when I got up the hill, trying
to come down you’d take a step forward with
that leg, and it’d just go out from under you.
The doctor never could get all the ligaments
back to hold it so it had strength in it. I had a
bunch of therapy, but it didn’t do any good.
The Tule Springs Dig
In 1962 or 1963 the National Science
Foundation granted the museum $42,200 to
excavate the Tule Springs site. Dick Shutler
wrote the proposal. He also got ahold of
Herschel Smith, who was a big contractor.
He had a bunch of contracts for the armed
services over in the South Sea Islands and
around—made plenty of money. Hersch
got interested in Tule Springs and setting
up things. He got International Harvester
to donate a 45-ton, 14-foot bulldozer,
which was new and that they had just for
experiment. It was the biggest one in the
country. They donated that to the project.
Hersch got all of the unions in Las Vegas to
furnish the operators. He also got a couple
of graders, and a Las Vegas outfit furnished
all the towels for the layout; the gas company
furnished gas for it—had to use propane.
They furnished a stove for us, too, along with
the propane gas. It was just a great outfit—
everybody contributing to the dig out there.
We figured that a minimum estimate of the
services and things that we had would be at
least $300,000.
Did you personally have anything to do with
raising this money?
Hersch did most of it around Las Vegas,
organizing it with Dick. I went down when we
got organized there, and they were about ready
to start. I was the only one that knew carpenter
work, and they had to have a building there
on the site for a cook shack and a place to eat
where they could have a table to make out
their notes at the end of the day and so forth.
Some of the crew and archaeologists were
gathering there, so I went down and put them
all to work. I laid it out, and we built about a
30-by-40-foot building and put it on blocks
with a floor and a good roof and everything.
Everybody slept outside, though, in sleeping
bags on the ground for the dig.
We were running these big trenches across
the wash down there, some of them as much as
a half mile long and about 20 feet deep. Those
fellows running the machines could take off
a half inch of dirt with those big machines!
Of course, when you come to something
that looked like it might be an artifact, then
you had to get in and do it by hand. This was
one of the first programs or projects set up
with of all the disciplines—with a geologist
The Development of Research adn Teaching Missions
69
and a paleontologist and archaeologist and
anthropologist all working there.
Well, what had led them to that site to begin
with?
Where did Shutler get these people? Were any
of them from the University of Nevada that
you can recall?
A couple of geologists with the U.S.
Geological Survey had found some points
in a level with Pleistocene bones there that
they had set a 5,000 or 6,000-year date or
something like that on. Everybody was
interested in it, and all the scientists had
thought there was probably human habitation
there way back, so they wanted to find out. But
we just couldn’t find it in that; we found some
human artifacts like some points and stones
that we figured had been worked by man,
but we couldn’t connect them up with the
dating. They put out a nice publication on Tule
Springs. I don’t remember which museum
number it is, but it’s one of the publications
that we put out when Dick was there.
No. Some of them were from the University
of Arizona, and some of them were from
Nevada Southern in Las Vegas. I don’t
remember just where they all came from.
Then we got Dr. Willard Libby and Jay Could
as advisors on it. They used to come up every
weekend or so from Los Angeles. Libby was the
Nobel prize winning scientist that developed
the carbon 14 testing. [Dr. Willard F. Libby
received the 1960 Nobel prize in chemistry
for his pioneering work in radiocarbon dating.
He was on the faculty at UCLA at the time of
the Tule Springs dig.—ed.] We had samples
current all the time, see; we’d take samples
each day as we went along. Hersch had his
twin-engined Cessna there, and the samples
would be flown to Los Angeles. A few days
later, we would have them back to the dig. So
we were having these current carbon 14 dates
as we dug around all the time.
Of course, Libby was head of the
department down there in Los Angeles.
He and Gould and a number of other
scientists were interested and came out
there. One of them, I remember, was a
doctor of anthropology or something from
South Africa, and some from the University
at Berkeley. So it was quite a renowned
thing, and the way Dick set it up for all
these scientists and advisors and everybody
working on it, it’s too bad we didn’t find more.
They had a good history of what the valley had
been and a lake that had been there, and they
found one big deposit of camel and ancient
horse and bison bones, but very little in the
way of human artifacts.
Were you using the Santa Barbara Museum
as a model for the archaeological program you
developed?
I don’t know as we used Santa Barbara any
for a model for our program; we just played it
by ear as the work come up. Of course, when
I finally hired Dick Shutler as a permanent
archaeologist, he found the various places
around and had them reported to him. We
did an awful lot of excavation work on Falcon
Hill and out in the Carson Sink and various
things like that until the big Tule Springs thing
came up. So we just developed it with our
own archaeologist. Of course, he knew pretty
much what to do and what was needed; went
from there. That was always my idea of getting
people in that knew what they were doing. I
didn’t know; I was learning. [laughter]
One gets the impression that there is a certain
amount of serendipity involved in finding these
sites. I have seen no reference to any sort of an
70
James W. Calhoun
archaeological site survey that may have been
conducted. Was there an effort to try to find
and identify sites throughout the state before
starting excavation work on any?
No. Phil and I made a big survey from up
around Lovelock clear down the east shore
of old Lake Lahontan looking for sites, but
we never did find any new ones. Of course,
Lovelock Cave had been excavated by
pothunters, so we never did find anything
worth working on. The ones Dick worked
on were discovered by pothunters and
people, but we started a campaign of trying
to educate the people on the value of the
things. If they reported to the museum, they
could take part in the dig if they wanted to.
And if they had items and would turn them
over to the museum for the study, when the
study was through they could have them
back if they wanted. So we started getting
cooperation, then, from them and sites
reported to us.
Finances and Staffing Problems
At the same time that you were getting a large
grant from the National Science Foundation for
the Tule Springs work it appears that you were
suffering some budgetary problems here in the
museum. I’ve come across references to the fact
that only 8 of the 32 staff were paid with state
funds. In addition, professional salaries were so
low that I gather you felt you were having some
difficulty keeping professionals on the staff.
Yes. We always had that trouble. You
couldn’t get the salaries up through the
legislature. They weren’t as interested in the
museum as they were later on, and I was lucky
to get one or 2 new staff members each 2 years
from the legislature.
From looking at some material that I found
in the State Archives, it appears that in 1958
the title of General Curator of the museum
was created by the trustees. The person who
was selected to fill that role was Judge Guild,
who then, I believe, was paid a salary as
general curator. What can you tell me about
the circumstances surrounding the decision
to create that title? The table of organization
showed the general curator reporting to the
trustees, and the museum director reporting to
the general curator rather than directly to the
board of trustees.
Well, actually it didn’t change anything at
all. It was just that the board agreed that the
judge could have a salary and remain there as
chairman.
Had he requested that?
Oh, yes. He fixed it all up. [laughter]
You couldn’t call him the director, because
I was the director. It wasn’t good to have the
chairman on salary, so the best way to handle
it was to set up a head curator of the whole
works, see? That means taking care of things,
so that was a good title for him.
Was his salary higher than yours?
Yes. A little bit.
Was that a full-time position for him after
1958?
Yes, he was full-time, practically. I mean,
he was retired and spent most of his time at
the museum.
The legislature also had said that there
couldn’t be any of the staff paid more than the
administrator, the head of the department.
The Development of Research adn Teaching Missions
They couldn’t get my salary up, so there was
no way that I could pay more to the heads of
the departments of archaeology and biology.
And another thing was that the board of
trustees had set up the salary for the judge
out of the Fleischmann Foundation money.
The judge was reluctant to raise his salary
up too much all the time on account of it
might jeopardize funds from the foundation,
and I couldn’t have a salary above the judge.
That held the whole thing down, see. When
I retired I was only getting $13,500. After
that, when Koontz got the crew on there and
they got interested in museums, why, then
the director’s salary went right up to around
$30,000.
So you were unable to pay your scientists a
competitive salary? Now, Dick Shutler was a
Ph.D. Who else on the staff in the early 1960s
had a Ph.D.?
No one. Our college graduates at that
time were Pete Herlan in biology and George
Wilson in geology.
What sort of a policy did you follow, then? Did
you pay Shutler as much as you were making?
Well, just right under. That’s one of the
reasons that Dick left, of course.
H e
figured he needed more money, and he was
offered a museum in Hawaii, so he resigned
and went down there.
If only 8 of your staff were being funded with
state money—and I’m certain that’s the case—
was the Fleischmann Foundation picking up
the salary for the others?
Yes. Of course, it wasn’t all just right out of
the foundation, because the major had given
71
the museum a bunch of stock in Standard
Brands that he had. So there was income
coming in from the stock that the major
had given. Then later on there was money
coming from Carl Jacobsen, who made some
donations to the museum. After he died, his
estate took care of his wife and had it all set
up for her, and then the museum got the rest
of it after she died. We also had other donated
income from memberships and the stocks,
and then we would ask the foundation for the
rest that we needed to make up our budget.
It must have been difficult to continue operating
under those circumstances. Were you ever able
to enhance salaries with the grants that were
being written? Could Shutler, as an example,
write himself a higher salary in a grant?
Well, I was always putting in raises in each
year for the staff. But, as you know, we could
only get them up so high! [laughs]
Pothunters at Pyramid Lake
In 1961 the Fleischmann Foundation provided
some money for a dig out at Pyramid Lake. I
understand that the pothunters were about to
beat you to the treasure once again! [laughter]
Yes, the Fleischmann Foundation awarded
a grant to survey and excavate the sites at the
Pyramid Lake reservation. We did make a
survey of the reservation, but then the Indians
were a little reluctant for all this archaeological
work where you dig up human beings, because
they figured they were their ancestors. So at
that time we made an agreement with the
Indians, and they’re still carrying it on, that
any bodies we found—-mummies like that
or skeletons—we would do the study, but as
soon as the study was done we would rebury
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James W. Calhoun
them. The Indians were agreeable to that, and
we were able to go ahead with the work, then.
I guess Donald Tuohy worked there
with crews for a couple of years doing the
excavation. We’d excavate through the
summer, and then as soon as we had to quit
on account of the weather coming on, winter
and so forth, why, the pothunters would take
over. [laughter] Go in and start in again;
never could get them educated. There wasn’t
any guard there or anything. We had some
success, though, when an organization of
amateur archaeologists was organized in
Reno. We were having pretty good success
then on them working with us and trying
to educate the public to the harm that they
would do by pothunting that way, and to the
effect that if they would just report sites to us,
they could take part in the digs. The material
that we found could be studied, and then if it
was appropriate that they had a place for it or
some use for it, they could have some of the
material back again.
We were starting to get some cooperation
from the pothunters, but there’s always
some diehards that would not belong to the
organization, and would go it on their own
anyway. They were not just from around
Nevada, but they’d come from Oregon and
Washington and Idaho, all over, to pothunt
in Nevada because it was such a great place
to pothunt—you know, all the open country
and easy to get at in the 4-wheel-drive vehicles
and so forth. So many people were making
that as their vacation, to come to Nevada and
pothunt.
8
Building a Core of Exhibits
Collection and Exhibit Policies and
the Historical Room
would find out about a collection and see if we
couldn’t obtain it and get it for the museum.
You had a strong interest in scientific research,
but no particular interest in collecting items
of historical value. You felt that the Historical
Society ought to be doing that.
What would be the guiding principle in
determining what would be put on display and
what would not? As an example, the U.S.S.
Nevada silver—what value do you see to the
public being allowed to view that?
Oh, yes.
Yet, the State Museum collected and displays
items of historical interest.
We did go out and collect. Whenever we
found out about a collection or something like
that, we would go and see what we could get
of it. I wanted to preserve all the material with
the idea that someday the museum might be
the stud duck of the whole layout, and make
exhibits for all the other museums around
the state. You would have all of this material
on hand that you could circulate around
and keep the exhibits changing all the time.
So we would go to various places where we
Well, most Nevadans were very proud of
the U.S.S. Nevada and the history of it. The
history was probably quite interesting to most
people—all that that battleship went through
in the 2 world wars. So that’s one of the
main things—an exhibit is something that’s
interesting to the people and will educate
them at the same time. If you can keep their
interest, then you are educating them, too.
For quite a long time there’s been a debate in
museology about the types of articles that ought
to be on display, as opposed to those that ought
not. It’s said that local museums often take
almost an “attic trunk” approach to exhibits,
74
James W. CAlhoun
where donated objects are put on display
whether or not they serve any real purpose or
illustrate any theme in history. There is another
approach to this, which is, of course, that
anything that captures the imagination of the
public and causes them to think about the past
and to think about it in serious terms, is worth
exhibiting. I am not trying to be critical of one
approach or the other; I’m just wondering if
you had a philosophy for what ought to be on
display and what ought not to be on display,
and if you can describe it for us?
My idea on that was...when I first went
there it seemed like the policy was you would
obtain a collection from someone and put that
collection on display and leave it there. That
was the collection of so-and-so. But my idea
was when we first obtained it, we should put it
on for a short time as that person’s collection.
Then it would go into storage, you might say,
and we would use items from that collection
to make up the various exhibits where we
wanted to show a certain thing—like early
transportation or various other subjects like
that. Then we would take things out of this
collection to use in that exhibit, and that way
the collections would be of use in a lot of
various ways instead of it being a dead issue
sitting there all at one time and all forever,
you know. [laughter] I started that after I got
there, and caught hell for it several times from
various old-timers that thought it should be
left all as a collection.
The biennial report for 1954-1956 makes
reference to the fact that there was some
reluctance on the part of donors to give items
of historical interest to the museum for the
Historical Room. As I understand it, you were
finding it difficult to acquire items of any
historical importance.
Well, probably one of the things that did
influence people on not giving it was they
would want to know if it would be put on
exhibit and kept there. Mrs. Jeanne Wier and
Mrs. Clara Beatty at the Historical Society
were doing that. There would be somebody’s
collection all in there, in a case, and probably
half the items would be with no label on them
to tell what they were. Right alongside of it
is another case with somebody’s collection
of practically the same things. That’s not
interesting to people, I don’t think. It’s
monotonous! [laughter]
But it was gratifying to the ego of the donors?
Yes! So people finally got over that, I think.
It became just a case mostly of people hating
more to let go of things that you didn’t get the
collections. Also relatives...a lot of times we
would go get a collection from some old-timer
and then find out that some of the relatives
were very upset that the museum got it instead
of them. Some of them would even be sore
about not getting it, because they wanted it to
sell it. It was getting more and more so that
all these historical items were worth money
in certain areas.
I suspect that this discussion of historical items
is not one of your favorite topics. [laughter] But
I want to continue for just a couple of more
minutes, because it is something the museum
has done over the years. In going through the
table of organization I find that there was no
curator of history. You had people who were
responsible for biology and for paleontology and
archaeology and such as that, but apparently
there was no single person who was responsible
for collecting objects of historical importance
or for developing some kind of an historical
display strategy.
Building a Core of Exhibits
Well, not to really go out and find things
historically. We just depended mostly on
finding out through other people about
collections and things. At first, it did come up
the persons doing the exhibits in the museum
would go out, because we didn’t have a very
big crew. Later we had crew enough that we
had a curator of exhibits and the technicians,
so we would have people that we could send
out. Many of the times I went myself, because
we didn’t have anyone in the first years of the
museum. I would see if I could talk them into
donating to the museum, because I figured a
part of the museum’s work was to preserve
these things. Eventually the curator of exhibits
was the person responsible for getting the
historical items in.
I think a lot of that procedure might be
from the policies I established at the museum.
History didn’t take a predominant part in the
museum’s interest, and the other departments
that I got started there, like natural history
and archaeology and so forth, had just as
much standing as the history department. The
curator of exhibits and the technicians spent
just as much interest and time in putting in
the archaeological and natural history exhibits
as they did the history exhibits. My idea, of
course, was that the Historical Society should
take care of most of the history, because we
had no place for a big library or anything like
that, and all the photographs and so forth. We
figured that the Historical Society should do
that, and that’s what has evolved out of the
whole thing. They have been able to secure
new buildings and a lot more rooms, so that
they have room for the libraries and for the
big collection of slides and photos. And those
are the programs that they should take care of.
Now that the whole state is getting interested,
they can expand in Las Vegas and so forth,
taking care of that part of it.
75
Over the years, many items that were of no
historical importance whatever were donated
to the Historical Society. Some of them were
actually scientific in nature; there are people
who have collections of arrowheads and
minerals and things like that. Was there ever
any effort to exchange things between the State
Museum and the Historical Society?
Well, not particularly. I mean, as long as
Clara was in there, there was no chance of that.
[laughter] She guarded all her possessions
very jealously, so I don’t imagine that there
has been much exchange. I know that they do
loan things back and forth now for exhibits
and so forth. If the museum here particularly
needs some historical items or some of their
archaeological items or something like that
for a special exhibit, they can get them. The
whole thing is getting to be much more
cooperative than it was before.
Dat-so-la-lee Baskets
The Dat-so-la-lee basket collection is, of course,
a tremendously valuable part of the total
museum collection. I believe that the baskets
were acquired before you came to the museum.
Yes. I never did delve into it much, but I
understood that the legislature appropriated
the money to buy the collection from the
Cohn estate. They had them on display down
in the corridors of the capitol for a while,
and when they purchased them part was to
go to the Historical Society and part to the
museum, which I guess they did.
Given their great monetary and cultural value,
I wonder if they’ve been treated any differently
from the other exhibits. As an example, has
there been any effort to establish climate control
76
James W. CAlhoun
for them in advance of other exhibits? Is the
security surrounding the Dat-so-la-lee baskets
any greater?
No, not that I know of. In fact, we keep
them clean and put them on exhibit. We have
a case with the Dat-so-la-lee baskets in it, and
they’re only protected that way. There’s no
special humidity or anything like that.
The V & T Room
When the Virginia and Truckee Railroad
closed in 1950, I went over and got as much
material as I could from the buildings over
there—the roundhouse and everything else
had already been stripped by some of these
fellows selling old stuff.
By stripped, do you mean they had gained
entrance to it illegally and gone in and taken
the stuff out?
Oh, yes. One fellow that I know of got next
to a secretary there and got a bunch of the
stuff. He run a store up in Silver City, and he
got an awful lot of the good things. Especially,
it was a lot of the paper stuff—bills of sale and
different things that he could sell.
What sort of an arrangement did the museum
work out with the V & T?
Well, I went over to go through all the
layout. I got all those patterns from the
foundry over there an the shops—those
wooden patterns that they used for casting
things. We got some of the paper material,
and I got the big clock that hung in the lobby
over there; you can see pictures of that in the
annual reports. But there’s a lot that I didn’t
get. After we received that, then we took
one of the galleries there and made a V & T
Room out of it with pictures and the things
we did have. We showed the wooden patterns
and made a little diorama thing showing the
process of casting the various bearings and so
forth.
The Gun Room
There were an awful lot of guns on hand
when I became director. The major’s guns
were there. He had acquired a big one that was
used for hunting birds out at Pyramid Lake
for the commercial market. A guy would tie
it on the side of an ox and have the ox walk
down to the edge of the lake with this damn
musket on there. He’d keep on the other side
so the geese couldn’t see him, and he’d blast
away and kill maybe up to 100 birds with the
thing. The major acquired that; we had that
there. The major had also received a couple of
highly decorated guns—real carvings all over
them and everything; he donated those.
There was a chance to get a bunch of war
surplus guns. I applied for the museum, and
I got a bunch of those war surplus weapons
that the United States Army had used or had
captured from Japan and from the Germans.
We put up quite an exhibit of the various
military guns in there. Other small collections
of guns came in as we went along, and with
the ones that they already had at the museum,
we looked up the history of them. I got a gun
shop man in from Reno to identify a lot of the
historical guns. Then we looked up history on
them, like the Sharp’s rifle and things like that.
We had a theft from the Gun Room one
time. The sheriff ’s office wouldn’t do anything
about it much. The deputy told me that they
found out the kid who did it—he sold the
guns in Salt Lake City. I guess on account of
his parents, the sheriff wouldn’t do anything.
Building a Core of Exhibits
It was only 4 or 5 pistols, but they were pretty
good historical items.
The Mammal and Bird Rooms
We had a Mammal Room for which the
major had purchased all these dioramas, and
we had all his African heads hanging around
on the wall. We had put in a few North
American heads, like an antelope and mule
deer and a desert bighorn sheep. Then when
we got the new Guild Annex, we took one of
the lower floors there and made it completely
into a Bird Room.
We moved all the birds from the Mrs.
Mills collection that they had upstairs to
new cases. We added a lot of birds that we
had gathered and Fred Holley had mounted.
Then we made the other side into a Mammal
Room, with mostly the smaller mammals—the
beaver and skunk and muskrats and ground
squirrels and all of those. We made regular
dioramas with painted backgrounds, curved.
They had that mountain lion that had been
mounted, so we made a display for that, using
our experience from the mine in making
rocks. We made a granite cliff-like deal, with
the mountain lion looking out on that. So we
developed a Mammal Room there with all the
small mammals and.... I think we did acquire
a pure melanistic black deer—mule deer—too,
that Mr. Holley mounted, and we put that on
exhibit.
77
The Paleontology Room
For the Paleontology Room, we had taken
all the birds out of that long case up there, and
we had quite a few specimens. Right at that
time there seemed to have been a little more
discovery of some fossils of mammoth tusks
and teeth and things like that by the highway
department doing work up around Lovelock
and different places. So we decided to make
a Paleontology Room out of it and put in all
these fossilized bones and stuff that we had
with the pictures of the animal as it was and
the history of them when they lived around
here, how they became extinct, how old and
the size of them. With the big mammoths the
ceilings were high enough to put up a picture
of the mammoth, and then we had arrows
going up to show just how high he was at the
shoulder.
A Memorial to Senator McCarran
Another item of major importance from
the mid-1950s is that the 1955 legislature
appropriated $50,000 toward an addition
which was to be made to the Senator Patrick
McCarran Memorial Room. What can you
recall about the circumstances surrounding the
proposed McCarran Room?
Were any of these exhibits specifically funded
by gifts? Has anybody given any money to the
museum and said, “Here, take this and put up
an exhibit of birds or mammals or whatever”?
Well, there was quite a bit of furniture
to come from his office, and we received the
furniture there and set up the McCarran
Room in that gallery upstairs. We got pictures
of his office in Washington, and made the
exhibit up to look just like his office there,
with his desk and chairs and things.
Not that I recall. It was just acquired
through donations that the major had given
them.
The legislature had appropriated a small
amount of money—$50,000—and yet it was
expected that a total of over $200,000 was
78
James W. CAlhoun
going to be needed in order to complete the
McCarran Memorial Room. Where did the rest
of the money come from? Or did it? Was there
any fund raising underway at the time to take
up the slack?
Well, I don’t know how it was. It seems
to me the thing must have died someplace!
[laughter] It certainly didn’t take any $50,000
to fix up the room that we fixed up there—
what we did then.
Apparently there was supposed to have been
additional construction that was to have
resulted in the Senator McCarran Memorial
Room, and yet none ever occurred. There was
also some controversy surrounding where the
papers would be housed, and indeed how the
papers were to be acquired. I don’t believe
that’s been resolved to this very day, has it?
Yes, I remember that. I remember there
was some controversy about that. We finally
acquired a bunch of papers, and some
professor a few years later came through
wanting to study them. We let him study the
papers, and he said there wasn’t anything
much there—that somebody had gotten all
the important stuff and put it someplace else
or destroyed it or something. He couldn’t
find anything of very much value in the
papers that we got.
she seemed satisfied with the display we put
on with his furniture there. We made the
office look authentic. Of course, the judge
was kind of in favor of something like that,
because he thought a lot of McCarran.
McCarran did help out the museum
several times, helping to get funds for it. I
remember once—I guess it was the Lake
Winnemucca caves—when we wanted
to start working on those and getting
permission from Washington. Phil Orr had
come up, and we were all ready to move out
there and work, and no permission came.
We were waiting and waiting, and so the
judge telegraphed McCarran about the thing.
Then about 2 days later we had our permit. It
came right through, and it was the same way
when we started the Western Speleological
Institute. We had everything organized and
ready and couldn’t get the word from the IRS
on the foundation— non-profit organization.
We contacted McCarran again, and he came
right through.
Coin Press No. S and the Mint Room
Did you ever have anything to do with
McCarran’s daughter?
There was another acquisition by the museum
that required some political maneuvering,
and that occurred shortly after these events
that we’ve been discussing with the McCarran
Room. That was the acquisition of coin press
number 5 from the San Francisco mint
in 1958. Can you recall anything about that
and about Senator Alan Bible’s role in the
acquisition?
Sister Margaret? Oh, yes. She was around
quite a bit, watching things and taking care
of things. I don’t think things came out just
the way she would have liked to have them
come out. I don’t think she was able to get
all the attention that she wanted for him, but
Yes. The editor of the Oakland Tribune
got on to it. He alerted the judge to it, and
he made all the arrangements. The judge
contacted Bible, and Bible got permission
for the museum to buy the coin press for the
amount that they would get from the junk
Building a Core of Exhibits
dealer—-$200. The editor arranged with the
Bigge baggage outfit to move the press from
San Francisco to Oakland, and then the judge
arranged with Wells Cargo to move the press
from Oakland to the museum and install it
in the museum.
Later, when Eva Adams was secretary
of the treasury (she had been McCarran’
s secretary) , they had a big shortage of
pennies, so she borrowed the press from the
museum and shipped it to Denver. They used
the press there. In 1963 it came back to the
museum after they got caught up on their
pennies. So it was a good thing we saved the
press, I think.
Wasn’t there an effort at some point to stamp
commemorative coins with that?
Oh, yes. The judge wanted to do that.
Of course, he would have to have some
parts of the press made—the parts that held
the stamps. So the judge wrote trying to
get those essential parts, and the Treasury
Department turned thumbs down on it.
After several letters back and forth, they
were getting pretty perturbed with this old
judge out here that wanted to coin money!
[laughter] Finally he couldn’t do anything
about it—they were threatening to come
out here and see what the deal was. If he
tried to print money, he’d go to jail, and so
he had to drop the whole thing. Nothing
ever happened to it until the centennial year,
when they finally did decide to stamp coins
there for the centennial year, and then they
fixed up the press with the right parts so they
could do it.
What did Judge Guild have in mind? What
kind of commemorative coins was he going
to stamp?
79
Something that the museum could sell
in the souvenir shop to make money on. I
don’t know what the design would’ve been or
anything else. It never did develop that far.
Was Alan Bible ever able to help the museum
in any other ways? Was he what you would
consider a friend of the museum?
Yes, he was considered a friend all
right. Alan was always very interested in
the museum, whenever he came out. I don’t
recall any particular things that he helped on
before, but he could’ve helped out on jarring
up the IRS or somebody else back there when
we needed it.
Can you recall any other instance when it
was necessary to call upon him for some
assistance?
Not right at the time I don’t.
Did the coin press turn out to be a popular
addition to the museum?
Yes, it was pretty popular. We put it on
display. We found that when there was a lot
of interest in something, it was good to make
an exhibit of it if we could. We found old bills
of lading and letters and different things we
could put up there—receipts of the bullion
coming in from the mines, and stuff like that.
I think we made some large plaster replicas
of the dollars to put around there, and then
someone gave us a collection of CC [Carson
City] dollars. We put in a case with all the CC
dollars that we could get, noting the years of
them, and pictures of the old mint building
and some of the history of it—the years that
it ran and the years that it didn’t run and so
forth.
80
James W. CAlhoun
Did you get any cooperation from the
Historical Society in putting this together, or
did you even try?
You didn’t have any one person doing the
interpretation for the Mint Room?
engine. There was a lot of interest in that.
It was something that we could get a press
release in the paper with. We put it right there
in the entrance hallway and fixed it up so we
could put a light in it—keep it lit. Publicity
was also a concern with the moon rock and
any small thing like that that would generate
a lot of interest.
We had a chance to get a moon rock
in 1970, and I sent Pete Herlan back to
Washington to pick it up. Pete guarded it in
his lap all the way home and brought it down
here. We had it on the table here for a while,
to see it and look at it. I put it on exhibit up
at the museum, and it developed quite a bit
of interest, of course.
No.
U.S.S. Nevada Silver
I’m beginning to get the idea that it was a group
effort on most of the exhibits. Was it just the
responsibility of whatever technicians were
involved in it to do the research?
The State Museum holds the silver set from the
U.S.S. Nevada. I understand that survivors of
the crew would come annually to view it back
in the 1950s. Can you tell me how that tradition
got started, and describe for me the activities
surrounding that?
No, I don’t remember even trying. I think
we probably had more material on the mint,
anyway, than they did.
Now, who did the interpretation for you?
Oh, the technicians looked up history on
it and found all the information we could, and
then we put the exhibit together.
Yes. It was always mostly a group effort.
The first thing is to find out what material
you do have. Then you can plan the exhibit
on what you’re going to do. Of course, that
requires some research, and for so much of
that stuff you don’t have artifacts. You have
to do it with maybe pictures, maybe just a
recounting of the history of it.
The State Seal and a Moon Rock
The state seal on exhibit is the one that
was in the Capitol in Washington. I think it
was Senator Bible who got that for us. They
were returning them all to the different states.
That was the original seal, where the artist put
the smoke going both ways—one way from
the mill and the other way from the steam
I don’t know how it got started, but they
used to have their meetings here quite often.
They would come to the museum to see the
silver set that we had there. Of course, we
didn’t have a great lot to do with their meeting
or anything like that. That was all organized
by the people at the head of that. They had
their regular meetings other places, like the
Ormsby House or someplace like that. But it
was mostly to come and see the silver set and
the history of it and so forth.
There was so much interest in the history
of the battleship, and this organization of
former crew members wanting to meet
there, you know, that we put together the
same sort of exhibit as the Mint Room, with
Building a Core of Exhibits
all the artifacts and things we had and could
find and the ship’s bell and pictures of the
battleship in action and everything else that
we could find. I had a whole bunch of flags
that we put up on the walls and made an
exhibit in that room of the battleship Nevada.
How did the museum acquire the U.S.S.
Nevada silver?
W h e n t h e U. S . S . N e v a d a w a s
decommissioned, the government began
using it for atomic bomb practice at Bikini
and Eniwetok atolls. The silver service came
back to Nevada, and they had it down there
in the capitol building for a while. That
was before I came here. Then after they
got the museum started, they moved it to
the museum, and it was already in the old
mint vault when I came here. All we did was
reorganize it some, clean it up good and get
labels on it.
We used to loan out the big punch bowl
for the governor’s inauguration, and it had
to be guarded. So the highway patrol would
send patrolmen up and pick it up and take it
to the event—the inauguration or whatever
it was—stay there with it and bring it back
to the museum after the festivities were
over with. We’d have to be at the museum to
receive it and put it back.
I would imagine that all of that silver required
a great deal of care. Who was responsible for
polishing it and keeping it in good order?
Well, the museum crew were. We’d take it
out and polish it once a year and sometimes
give it new labels, whatever it needed.
Docents were responsible for it after we got
docents, but there was a long time there that
we didn’t have any.
81
An Indian Encampment
When the museum trustees were
interested in building the gallery upstairs,
Sessions “Buck” Wheeler got the idea—I
think, kind of from the mine, the way it
wound around there—of making that upstairs
gallery into a real Indian deal of forest and
sagebrush and trails through it and an Indian
encampment and everything like that. Well,
that just couldn’t possibly be done. There
wasn’t room enough to do anything so
extensive and still have it look like anything.
But Buck and those wanted to get the money
for it, so the foundation put up the money,
and I came up with the idea of that life-size
camp group that is up there now.
I had Howard Hickson as curator of
exhibits then. We designed the Indian
encampment and made contact with this firm
in Los Angeles to make the wax figures. They
made them from photographs that we went
out to Nixon, Nevada, and took of several of
the people—Harry Winnemucca and Poncho
and Sarah. We had just gotten them installed
and the exhibit pretty well completed there,
when a family of Indians came through, went
down on one side of the exhibit and stopped
and looked, and the guy said, “I know them.
That’s Poncho! That’s Harry Winnemucca!”
So that’s how lifelike they were from these
photographs.
9
Expansion and Consolidation
1962-1972
Vandalism
Looking for the figures for use of the museum,
it’s apparent that the major influx of visitors
occurs in the summer. And, in fact, during the
early 1950s apparently 10 times as many people
were coming to the museum in the summer as
were in the winter. It would drop off to a mere
trickle in the winter. How did that affect the
operation of the museum? Or did it?
No, not particularly. They were free to just
wander and go through. Everything was pretty
much under glass. We always kept everything
labeled well, so that anyone interested could
find out what the articles were or any history
about them, how they were used. For a long
time there we had no one watching in the
daytime except the crew working around
there. Finally we got old Bill Stewart, retired
U.S. Marshal for Nevada and Thelma’s exboss, in as a guard. But there didn’t seem to
be any need ofit with all those people going
through. Never did have any vandalism or
anything else, except that little bit down in
the mine and kids in the early 1960s.
In the period 1962 through 1963, there
was a sharp increase in vandalism. Two kids,
high school age, broke out all the exit signs
with a hammer and did other damage. It’s just
one of those things where one or two kids
or several will happen to get together in the
town, and then they start vandalizing things.
We’re having some of that going on in Carson
City right now. Every once in a while there’s a
bunch of tires punctured in different sections
of town. There’s several kids that are running
around in a gang and vandalizing today. It
happens for a while, and then evidently the
people move, and the kids break up, and then
you don’t have any vandalism for a while.
Efforts in Las Vegas
As I understand it, the first efforts to establish
a branch of the museum in Las Vegas occurred
in the 1960s. I think it’s rather important—the
development of the museum as a statewide
84
James W. Calhoun
agency. What were the museum’s first steps in
that direction?
In the period of 1962 to 1963, we
installed 12 cases of exhibits in the Las Vegas
convention center. They liked them fine, but
they didn’t take care of them. We had to go
down each year and clean them out and make
any repairs needed. And then that convention
center was always changing top men there—
firing the head man and getting somebody
else—and management got so they weren’t
too interested in it. So we went down and
gathered up our exhibits and brought them
home.
Of course, in the southern part of the
state we had also cooperated with the Lost
City Museum out at Overton. I don’t 162
think anything had been done much before
that, that I know of. That was the idea of the
convention center deal.
Judge Guild put Joe Wells on the museum
board. Wells owned the Thunderbird down
there at that time and, of course, owned Wells
Cargo freighting. Judge Guild put him on the
board and wanted Joe to see if he could get any
interest down there in it. From the report that
Joe gave us, he had contacted the Historical
Society down there and so forth, and they
said they didn’t want anything to do with the
museum. I don’t know why, and I don’t know
if the judge ever knew why. He never did tell
me, anyway. But that was the word that we got
from Joe, so we didn’t figure there was much
we could do there.
lady. She was real interested and I think was a
big help to the judge on getting more interest
in Las Vegas toward a museum.
Was it the judge’s idea, or was it yours or the
trustees’ to open up the exhibits in the Las Vegas
convention center?
I believe that eventually Florence Cahlan was
instrumental in getting the museum established
down there.
It was the trustees’ decision in a meeting.
I don’t know who brought it up—probably
Tom Wilson. There was always discussion
on methods that they could use to get known
around the state more and get more interest
in the museum. Of course, with Las Vegas
expanding so much and everything, the idea
was to get them interested down there, so we
could have a branch down there and be the
stud duck of the whole thing, you know.
It was always my idea to have this as the
main establishment, and if they had branch
museums around, make up the exhibits here
to take to the other museums. That way,
we could use more of our material that’s
in storage instead of having it stored away,
and keep it rotated. But that didn’t work out
so much, either, because each little county
wanted their own museum. They didn’t
want us to get tangled up in it too much and
probably take over from them, see.
Thelma says the most successful exhibit
we had was the one they “stole” for the
Las Vegas museum. It was a series of the
outstanding dioramas that the major had
made in San Francisco. It was in the gallery
there that they made into that old ghost
town, where they had the burro and the
talking things. They moved them all to Las
Vegas for that new museum. Yes, that was an
outstanding exhibit.
Yes. I think she was on the board for a
couple of years before I retired. A very nice
So it’s not exactly theft we’re talking about here,
then? [laughter]
Expansion and Consolidation 1962 - 1972
No, they didn’t steal them, but...there
were too many Vegas people on the board of
trustees.
But this was after your retirement?
Yes. Well, this museum here is probably
going to have to keep building some exhibits
for Las Vegas, but then, of course, you have
to have money to do it, and it’s going to take
the time away from the staff here. That’s one
thing that probably has the museum behind
in their work here is getting everything
ready for that museum down there and
transporting it down there and getting it
set up so they could open that museum.
They don’t have a great big staff here at the
museum to do all that.
Renewed Space Shortages and
the Calhoun Annex
By 1964 you were submitting reports from the
director to the board of trustees. I believe that’s
the first time that I have seen evidence of your
actually communicating anything in writing to
the trustees in biennial reports. What had been
the policy before that? Apparently Judge Guild
had been, in a sense, the only spokesman for
the museum up until then.
Yes, but Thelma and I usually made up
all the reports. I’d get all the facts and figures
ready and everything else, and Thelma would
write them up for me because she’s so good
with words and language. Then we would
present them to the judge, and he’d OK it.
His name was signed to it, so the judge was
always putting out these annual reports. But
finally toward the last we just had the judge
write out a little introductory deal, and then
I as the director put out the report.
85
So you had been writing them all along, then?
Yes. Yes, we did all of the reporting on all
these things.
One of the things that you mentioned in 1964,
the first report that actually had your name on
it, was the great need for space. And this is only
5 years after the Guild addition.
Yes. We were in such bad shape when they
built those new additions that it didn’t take
very long to fill them up, and we still needed
more room. That’s why we started working on
getting the land from the BLM, and then going
to see if we could get another big storage outfit
and work area, because we had no more room
around the museum. You couldn’t buy up one
of those lots around the museum or anything
then; nobody had ever had money enough to
do that, so we had to get a place where the land
was cheap and where we could afford to do it.
After I left, the legislature became interested
in museums and getting started in Las Vegas,
and so they put up the money for the big new
storage outfit out there.
In your biennial report for 1966-1967, you once
again took note of “deplorable conditions” in
the museum and pointed out that space was
cramped, work spaces were deteriorating and so
forth. You suggested that for years the museum
had tried without success to get adequate
support from the legislature. When you pointed
out in this report that you absolutely must have
it, had conditions actually deteriorated beyond
what they had been like before, or were you just
using hyperbolic language in order to try to get
some action?
Well, we just probably.. .oh, I wouldn’t
say we were exaggerating, but just whooping
86
James W. Calhoun
it up a little more, I guess, to try and get the
attention that was needed.
Two years after that, the planning began for the
Calhoun Annex. Was that a result of this final
and most vocal plea for some support from the
legislature?
No, but it probably helped all of our...I
mean, if we were pleading with the legislature,
why, it also influenced the foundation some.
It was just an ongoing campaign all the time.
What finally pushed the Calhoun Annex over
the top were mostly the judge’s efforts, because
he was the one raising money all the time and
making contacts with the legislature and the
foundation and anyone else that would listen
to him for funds to do these things. So it’s
mostly through the efforts of Judge Guild that
the funding for these buildings came about.
An Expanding Educational Mission
By 1966, the State Museum was designated
as an educational institution by the federal
Department of Health, Education and Welfare
(HEW) . Can you recall the circumstances
surrounding that and tell me what impact it
may have had on the museum?
Well, I don’t recollect exactly the impact,
but the reason we wanted to get that was so
that we would be eligible for government
surplus material. We thought we could use
quite a bit of it in some of our digs. We did
get some, but I don’t recall just what on that.
But that was the main idea—so that we would
be eligible to request surplus material. We
had sought for years to quality the museum
to receive federal surplus real property. This
recognition indicated that we had met certain
rigid educational standards.
Well, if you had been seeking for years and
had not succeeded until 1964 or 1965, can you
recall why you had failed until then, and what
things changed?
Yes, we enlisted the help of Senator Alan
Bible. A letter from the undersecretary of
HEW to Senator Bible stated in part: “It is
apparent from the information made available
by the Nevada State Museum that its program
is uniquely and exceptionally oriented
to educational activities and purposes.
Accordingly, I have determined that the
museum is qualified to participate in the
surplus real property program.
Politics is a wonderful thing, isn’t it? [laughs]
Oh, yes. Yes, we had pretty good success
with McCarran and Alan Bible. [laughter]
That year was also the year we put
36 portable cases out to the audiovisual
departments of schools in Pershing,
Humboldt, Lander, Elko, White Pine and
Lincoln counties, and 3 of each kind to the
Washoe County School District and 9 to
the Clark County district. We were starting
the portable cases to supplement the mobile
museum—something that we could leave
with the teacher, that the teacher could use
for a week or so when she wanted to. We
would gather them back at the end of school
and redo them and repair them through the
summer, ready for the school season next
year. But on this year Clark County kept
theirs because they wanted to use them for
their summer sessions at the nature school
at Charleston Park. We kept increasing the
number till we had something over 100 cases
out. The teachers were all real satisfied and
real happy with them. Now, I don’t know
whether the museum is still carrying them on
Expansion and Consolidation 1962 - 1972
or if they are just sitting down there in storage
someplace.
To give you an idea of how the museum
was expanding at this time (1964-1965) , and
the requests to the museum for the services of
its staff, Pete Herlan made a biological survey
of the Valley of Fire and a wildlife survey of the
whole state for the state park department. We
also gave 2 exhibits to the University of Nevada
for its Great Basin Conference; 5 exhibit
cases of silver and Virgin Valley opals for the
Clark County Gem and Mineral Society, and
a similar one for the Gem and Mineral Show
in Reno; and we constructed 3 diorama cases
for the Valley of Fire State Park.
From that list of items, it seems that the
museum was getting more involved in creating
exhibits for other agencies.
Yes, we were. We made exhibits for quite
a few places around. We had some in the
Ormsby County Library and I think in the
library in Reno and various services like that.
We were getting called on more and more
all the time, and the staff were getting more
and more requests to speak. Pete Herlan and
Dick Shutler and Don Tuohy and several of
the people gave lectures and talks to different
clubs and organizations. It just shows the
direction the museum was taking—expanding
its services all over.
I understand that one of the services that
you began planning in 1966 was the summer
teaching program for junior high school
students in natural history.
Well, it was just our interest in teaching.
We had the staff there in taxidermy and
exhibit preparation and so forth. I don’t know
just how students found out about it— word
87
of mouth probably; we didn’t advertise or
anything—but those who were interested
could come in and work with the staff on
whatever they were interestedin. Most of it,
I think at that time, was in the taxidermy and
biology departments, except that archaeology
always had volunteers working with them—
whether it was students or just pothunters or
what.
Did the museum benefit from the students
coming in and working?
Oh, only in the publicity area, I imagine. It
didn’t actually help out our work very much.
In fact, it did take some of the staff time to
do the teaching, but I think it paid off in
publicity and keeping the public interested
in the museum.
Was that program still in existence when you
retired?
Yes. By that time we had the docent
organization going, and they were taking
over some of this lecturing to students and
different services like that.
The docent program got started quite late
in my administration. I had talked it up quite
a bit, but the board were kind of lukewarm,
and the judge didn’t like anybody else around
much having say on anything. [laughter] I
thought they could be a great help. The crew
were pretty much against it. They thought they
would just be a nuisance, showing them how
to do things and having them try to help. So
it took me a couple of years or so working on
it before it finally materialized and got started.
Of course, after they got going, everybody
was pretty much in favor of it. They found
out what they could do and that they weren’t
going to be just people underfoot.
88
James W. Calhoun
No Support From Casinos
By the time you retired, casino gambling was
very important in the economy of Carson City.
Did the museum ever receive any assistance
from the casinos in town?
No. Real early in the history of the
museum I think it did receive some donations
from Harold’s Club in Reno. I can’t remember
whether there was anything out of Harrah’s
Club or not, or whether they had developed
that big at that time.
Can you recall any support ever from the
Nugget or from the Ormsby House here in
Carson City?
Of course, the Ormsby House was quite
late in my term up there. But they never have
contributed, and the Nugget never would.
Dick Graves started the Nugget there in one
small area and then expanded and took in
the Old Corner Bar, took in Ella Broderick’s
and the meat market and the grocery store
that was there, till he had that whole block.
Nugget never would. Dick Graves started
the Nugget there in one small area and
then expanded and took in the Old Corner
Bar, took in Ella Broderick’s and the meat
market and the grocery store that was there,
till he had that whole block. But they never
did contribute to the museum either. It was
always kind of a sore point with the judge,
because some places like the Nugget probably
benefited from the museum. So many people
stopped at the museum and then came over to
the Nugget. Lots of them in the summertime
would stop there and leave their kids at the
museum; then they would come over to the
Nugget and let us babysat the kids a couple
of hours! [laughter]
We never did receive much help around
here for the museum, except when they first
started. Then the judge had these buttons
made to raise money, and the Boy Scouts and
the Girl Scouts helped sell the buttons. Local
fund drives like that helped to get the museum
started, but after that there never was much
help locally.
Acquiring V & T Rolling Stock
About the time the Calhoun Annex was being
built, the museum began acquiring V & T
rolling stock. I have no idea what led to its
acquisition then and not before. Can you tell
me how that happened, what the focus was?
Well, the railroad buffs were always
campaigning for Nevada to save the V
& T. Finally one year the legislature did
appropriate some money toward that. We
didn’t particularly want the job, because we
were developing the museum, and we didn’t
want to give our attention and money to some
other project...and we knew that this V & T
thing would take lots of attention and money.
Regardless, the legislature turned it over to
the director of the Nevada State Museum to
acquire this rolling stock of the V & T with
the money they had appropriated. When I
investigated that, why, there was some rolling
stock that was in good shape that the motion
picture industries had used, like some of the
engines; but the biggest part of the stuff was
just stored in the yards of the companies
where they had acquired it. Some had been
used in motion pictures and wrecked, and a
lot of it had just deteriorated through time
and exposure to the elements and so forth.
Most of it was in the Los Angeles area. We
started acquiring that, anyway, and got it up
here. We weren’t able to do too much with the
Expansion and Consolidation 1962 - 1972
money that the legislature had appropriated...
something like $l0,000-$20,000. We got most
of that junk stuff and had it out here on the
lot by Mound House for quite a while.
Had the legislature appropriated sufficient
funds to do anything with that stuff once you
acquired it?
No. We were just supposed to gather
it up to preserve it. A lot of it was in terrible
shape. You don’t realize what a bunch of junk
it was that I was able to obtain and bring
up here. Of course, they were disappointed
in that part of it. Afterward, they got to
appropriating more funds and we eventually
wound up acquiring some of the engines.
They were able to obtain those 2 engines that
were over in Salt Lake City that had been
used for the centennial of the joining of the
railroads. We acquired those, and I don’t have
any idea how much money the legislature has
put up recently for all that. It must be quite a
sum.
Well, apparently they put up quite a lot, if you
can judge by the amount of work that’s been
done on it. Did Richard Datin, the current
curator of the railroad museum, have anything
to do with this? He wasn’t even hired at that
time, was he?
He wasn’t hired until after I left there.
Jack Porter was director of the museum at
that time, and he acquired the V & T project
along with the museum directorship. He
hired Datin for this when they started putting
pressure on him, giving him the money.
Was there any one person on the museum
staff, while you were still the director, whose
responsibility was the V & T rolling stock?
89
No, not any one person. The judge and I,
as far as that goes, weren’t too interested in
doing it, because we didn’t particularly want
to get tied up with it. That’s one of the kicks
with some of the staff at the museum right
now—that this Virginia and Truckee Railroad
outfit is taking too much of the attention and
the money of the museum. They figure it’s
to the detriment of some of the other projects
of the museum. But, they have been doing a
wonderful job on restoring all that equipment
and getting it in shape.
AAM Accreditation
In the last year that you were director, the
museum was accredited by the American
Association of Museums (AAM) I would
imagine that was something you’d be very
proud of.
Yes, it was. We applied for it, and eventually
they sent up 3 directors of other museums—2
of them from California and one from
someplace else. I had to take them all through
the museum and tell what we were doing and
why, and show them all our facilities and
everything like that. Then they left and made
their report, and we received the accreditation
from the American Association of Museums.
It was quite a feather in our cap for a small
museum; several of the others around didn’t
receive it. San Francisco and Oakland had to
make a second go at it, and we received it the
first thing.
That was the first time you had ever applied
for accreditation?
Yes.
What led you to apply for it then, in 1972?
90
James W. Calhoun
Oh, I think there was quite a bit of
publicity in the American Association of
Museums pamphlets, and it certainly added
credibility to our operation. It seemed like
a very good thing, and the board was quite
impressed with something if the museum
could get it, so we applied for it. We had no
trouble. I didn’t make any preparation at
all. I just gave it to them the way it was. The
only thing that they found wrong that I ever
noticed while they were examining us was
the table saw blade was sticking up out of its
table. They mentioned that, but I had to tell
them that the thing was broken so that you
couldn’t lower it down there. We had a part
coming for it, so that satisfied them. They
were also concerned about the chairman of
the board, Judge Guild, receiving a salary.
But evidently I explained it to them right
or something, because we never did hear
anything more about it. But they did question
that quite thoroughly.
You mentioned that securing accreditation
was good in a publicity sense. Did any
other advantage accrue to the museum as a
consequence of its being accredited?
Well, not that I could ever see. And I don’t
know they’ve even kept it up, or whether
there is such a thing any more or what. I left
there, so I don’t know whether it’s anything
of importance any more or not.
10
Judge Guild, Major Fleischmann
and Other Trustees and Staff
Clark J. Guild
I can’t remember the first time I met
Judge Guild. I knew he was there all the time
when I was working for Tony Green building
cabinets, but probably the first time I had any
contact with him was when they called me
into the office and wanted to know if I could
finish the mine. They were having a board
meeting there. I told him I thought I could,
and so they gave me the go ahead. They had, I
think, $30,000 left, and they wanted to know if
I could finish it with that. Well, in those days
$30,000 looked like a heck of a lot of money
to me, so I said I could! [laughter] I had no
idea if I could or not, because I didn’t know
anything much about museum work, but I
went to work on it.
Judge Guild was kind of a square-set
fellow, about 5 feet, 10 inches tall, I guess.
He had only one leg; had a wooden leg on
the other one. When he was a young man,
he’d been a brakeman on the railroad that
ran from Mound House down to someplace
in California. At that time I think it was a
narrow gauge; they later made it standard
gauge. But he was a brakeman, and he got
caught under one of the cars once and lost
his leg.So he had an artificial leg, and quite a
limp with it. He used a cane all the time. Had
quite a bit of trouble with that stump getting
irritated. It was off at the knee, and I guess he
had those phantom pains that they talk about.
But generally, he was in pretty good health till
the last few years.
The judge was quite opinionated and very
abrupt. Their years on the bench, I think,
affect a lot of judges. When they’ve been a
judge a long time, they figure out their word is
pretty much law. But the judge and I got along
very good. He found out that I could do the
work and that I knew how to do an awful lot
of things, and I wasn’t going to take the glory
away from him; I always consulted with him
on things. So we had no trouble at all. The
judge got so that he called me his right-hand
man and had a lot of faith in me. Toward the
end there, he just came around and looked at
things once in a while, and was very agreeable
with everybody and everything.
92
James W. Calhoun
After the mine exhibit was finished, there
was only the 3 of us there—the building
superintendent and the secretary and myself.
Judge Guild was still on the bench then, and
one day he wanted to contact the museum
for something; I don’t remember just what it
was, but he figured it was pretty important.
He called up and couldn’t get anybody.
I was off in the building...George Smith
and I were working, and the secretary had
gone someplace for a little while. Anyway,
the judge blew his stack on that one and
adjourned the court and come up to the
museum. I think I was back in the Mammal
Room then, and he come raring in there
all red in the face. But I was able to explain
to him that it just happened to be that the
desk was empty for a little while; that we
all couldn’t be right there if the telephone
rings all the time. So he calmed down, and
everything was all right. And that’s about the
only thing close to an altercation that I ever
had with him.
Judge Guild obviously had a great deal of
success as a fund raiser. To what would you
attribute his success in bringing money in to
the museum?
His success was his years on the bench
and the honor of being a judge for so
long. People looked up to him. Then he
was interested in politics, of course, all the
time, and knew many of the politicians and
legislators. Some of them didn’t like him;
others did. He was able to present things to
the legislature down there and work with
the right people, and he had quite a bit of
success—not always. But he would seek out
the heads of the different committees when
he needed to and deal with them. Then he
got Major Fleischmann interested, kept him
interested so that he was able to get those
funds. The judge was always very interested
in getting funds for the museum.
In those days you could build up
an endowment fund, you know. A lot of
museums did it in those early days and built
up enough of an endowment that they had
income coming from those funds to support
them. It was always the hope of the judge that
he could get enough rich people interested to
collect enough funds that the museum could
be supported from its income, and not have
to go down to the legislature for funds and
everything—be pretty independent that way.
But it never did work out that way. Things
changed and he never was able to raise the
great amounts that it would take to invest
for that much income. Then the conditions
changed so that museums that had been able
to get by that way were having trouble. It was a
big disappointment to the judge that he never
could attain that goal.
How much influence did he have over selections
of people to sit on the board of trustees?
Oh, practically all...he having started the
museum, gotten the legislature to obtain the
building,
and raised all this money and
everything. He was the one that would appoint
the people to the board. He would suggest it to
the other board members, and they’d go right
along with him on who to get. Of course, he
would suggest people that had contacts in their
business with monied people, hoping that
they would have influence enough with these
people to get various millionaires to leave a
bequest to the museum when they died.
Did he have any notable success in that area?
Just one: old Carl Jacobsen over in Ely.
He and his brother had built up quite a
little fortune. He got Carl interested in the
Judge Guild, Major Fleischmann and Other Trustees and Staff
93
museum, and when Carl died he left his funds
to the museum, except some to take care of
his wife until she died, and then everything
came to the museum.
The way the museum is set up, the
membership elects the board. But I think the
judge maybe stacked that a little by getting
friends as members of the board. For a long
time there, there never was any great effort
to have the membership have a regular
board election, you know. Most of the board
members there through the early part of my
term were suggested by the judge and OK’d
by the board, and somebody that was willing
to accept the appointment.
The judge always wore a suit and tie. He
came to his museum desk the same as he
would dress if he was on the bench, and he
always had a flower in his lapel. The judge
spent most of his time up there in the front
office at his big desk. He had this great big
desk there and a swivel chair. Once in a while
he’d take a stroll through the museum and see
what we were doing.
for lunch. It was just a question of changing
off on manning the front desk to answer any
questions of tourists and help out that way on
lunch hour. The rest of the crew just went to
lunch wherever they wanted to go.
Did he socialize with you or the rest of the staff?
Practically all of it was left to me after
I got established there. I would talk things
over with the judge, and if it needed any
more discussion, he would talk it over with
the board when they met. Otherwise I would
draw up the plans for the cases and work with
the technicians on how they were going to
develop it, and let them go ahead and mold
the figures and let the taxidermist mount the
animals or birds, whatever we needed. Once
you get the right people in there to do the
work, you just have to line out the project
and then turn them loose on it—somebody
painting backgrounds in the cases, and
others sculpturing the figures and making
the foliage and one thing and another that
went in there. And the judge’d come around
and take a look once in a while.
He was always very sociable, but the only
social part of it would be when there was a
special occasion—a party at the museum,
or some of the parties we had here with the
staff—the judge’d be here. But we never did
go out together anyplace or anything.
What would happen at lunchtime every day at
the museum? That’s often an occasion for some
socialization.
Well, a few of the staff brought their own
lunch, and others all went off in their own
directions. The town is so small that most of
them could run home for lunch at noon and
come back again. You know, have an hour
Judge Guild was involved with the museum
from its very beginning, from 1939 up until his
death. That would be a period of over 20 years.
Beyond founding the museum and acquiring
Major Fleischmann as a chief contributor, how
would you say that he most influenced the
growth and development of the State Museum?
Money! [laughter] If it hadn’t been for
all the money he got in there, we couldn’t
have developed the museum the way we did.
Getting the money from the legislature and
the foundation for those 2 annexes gave us all
the room for the kind of exhibits we wanted
to put in, and work space.
How much influence did the judge have over
the kind of exhibits that went in?
94
James W. Calhoun
Max C. Fleischmann
Major Fleischmann was a very little fellow
and had very big eyebrows and tufts of hair
sticking out of his ears that gave him kind of
a pixie look, I guess. He was usually dressed
in kind of uniform-type jackets. It wouldn’t
be just an ordinary mackinaw or anything; it
would be more of a dressy kind of a uniform
type, like you would have on a safari or
something like that.
Major Fleischmann had pistols that he
wore all the time, even in the museum. He was
a.... Well, he was part of the governor’s posse
for quite a while, until...I don’t remember
what governor it was—Pittman, I guess. [Vail
Pittman was governor of Nevada from July,
1945 through 1950.—ed.] He finally had a
falling out with Pittman over something, and
Pittman took him off the posse. So he got
himself appointed as a deputy U.S. marshal,
and every time they needed road blocks up
at Lake Tahoe, especially when a prisoner
had escaped from the state prison in Carson
City, Fleischmann would set up his own road
blocks up there and stop cars and search them.
And he always wore his pistols on him.
On museum matters, Major Fleischmann
dealt with Judge Guild most of the time. My
contact with the major was practically all just
through the making of the mine, developing
that. He would come down from Lake Tahoe
on his way to Reno and drop in there, go
through it and discuss things. He was always
in a hurry and very businesslike.
Did he express a personal interest in any of
the things that were going on in the museum,
other than the mine? Of course, he had
contributed to the construction of the mine
and so I would imagine that was the basis for
his interest in that. Beyond that did he have
an interest in any of the projects that you felt
were important?
Well, not particularly after we did the
mine. He had had before that, but that was
before my time when he had all those dioramas
built and installed there. And even before that,
when they were fixing up the building after
they got it from the government, they had
the WPA [Works Progress Administration]
boys working there. He came down one day,
according to the judge (of course, this was
all before my time) , and saw them standing
around there like they did in the WPA days
[laughter]. He was very disgusted with it and
wanted to get his own contractor on there,
so the judge said OK. So he went down and
got Dressler from Gardnerville to come up
and finish the job. He put him on the job and
helped pay for a lot of it. But after I was there,
after we finished the mine, he used to attend
board meetings, but that was about all—he
had no particular interest in any of the other
exhibits or anything.
The major would come through regularly
to check on the progress of the mine. He
would give a suggestion once in a while—
could we do this or that—but generally I
would find that it wasn’t practical and that
we wouldn’t have room for it or something
else. We already had our plans of how we
were going to develop it, so I would go right
on as we were. Next time he came through,
he was all satisfied with the way everything
was going, and there’d be no more said about
what he’d talked about before. [laughter]
But I didn’t find him to be a flitter head or
anything like that. He was a very abrupt man
when he was telling you about things, and
wasted no words about it or anything. You
could see his training as an officer in the
artillery in World War I—that came through,
Judge Guild, Major Fleischmann and Other Trustees and Staff
you know. He was very businesslike, and with
all of his money, why, people didn’t dispute
him very much. He got his way when he
wanted it.
You had a strong interest in research and
education as far as the museum was concerned.
Did the major ever show any interest in either
of these things?
Well, the major was always interested in
natural history, the animals and things. In
fact, he carved out a mountain goat once. Did
a pretty good job. But as far as research goes,
he never expressed an interest in having the
museum begin to engage in those activities.
He may have talked it over with the judge or
something, but he never did talk over with
me any direction like that.
There seems to have been a rather strong
association, at least in the early years, between
this museum and the one in Santa Barbara.
You used some of their expertise; Phil Orr was
on the staff at Santa Barbara. You yourself
went down there and were trained in a 2-week
session.
That was all due to the major, because he’d
been interested in that museum long before
this one, and donated funds for it. When he
got interested in this one, things came up.
Like, when we needed the archaeologist, he
was instrumental in getting Dr. Coggeshall
to send Phil up here. And in our Western
Speleological deal, Dr. Coggeshall was one of
the directors on that, Of course, when it came
to sending me away for some education, that’s
why they sent me to Santa Barbara. They were
all impressed with the taxidermy work and
modeling done there, so I spent quite a bit of
the time with their taxidermist.
95
Did Major Fleischmann pick up the tab for
sending you down there and for bringing Phil
Orr up here?
It came out of donated funds, and some
of it was the major’s funds, of course. We
didn’t particularly keep the major’s funds,
or the foundation funds later, in a separate
line, unless it was a donation for a particular
thing like they did with the elevator for one
of the buildings. But when they donated the
funds for part of our operating expenses
and salaries, it just went into our general
funds that we had from all the other sources
of income except the state. It was all kept
separate from the state funds, but the board
could then just use it for everything that was
needed.
Were you able to observe how Major
Fleischmann and Judge Guild got along with
one another?
Oh, they got along pretty well. They
had differences of opinion, but they always
resolved them...nothing serious. Each one
was a very outspoken man.
Well, they were both strong-willed men, as
you’ve pointed out, and it would seem from
what we know about their careers that each one
of them would want to be in charge.
The major was putting up an awful lot
of the money. They figured on keeping the
major interested, and so his word carried an
awful lot of weight there on things. If it was
practical, why, they went along with the major
a lot.
The only other thing I can add about the
major was that he wouldn’t have anything to
do with art. Some of the art organizations
96
James W. Calhoun
tried to get funds from him, but he would
have nothing to do with it, and he didn’t
want the museum to get mixed up in any
art at all. Didn’t want to put up the money, I
guess! In tact, he left that up to his wife. Her
contributions were more toward charitable
organizations and art. So the major kept his
more to the scientific end of it, I think, on
museums and education, library buildings
and stuff like that.
After the major died, Sarah Fleischmann
used to attend all museum board meetings.
She was an honorary board member; she was
interested in seeing that the major’s interests
were taken care of after he died. She used to
attend the board meetings, but she didn’t have
any particular say-so or anything like that. I
mean, she didn’t come around where we were
working or anything like that.
Following Max Fleischmann’s death, the
Fleischmann Foundation was interested in
donating to the museum because they figured
that that was the major’s wish. That was one of
the main reasons that they continued to fund
the museum on various projects, like putting
up money with the state to build the 2 wings
there.
Some Influential Trustees
We’ve already talked a little bit about the
fact that the judge more or less stacked the
board of trustees. The board obviously had an
important role to play in the development of the
museum. There are a couple of names that come
to mind immediately who were influential.
Early on William Donovan was an important
member of the board. What can you tell me
about him and about his contributions to the
museum?
Bill was a native of the Comstock. His
father had the mines and mills there before
him; then he took over. When we came here,
he was still running the mill in Silver City.
In fact, when I first was up in Virginia City
I rustled for a job at his mill, but he didn’t
have anything. Bill had quite a fortune, but
he got mixed up with Errett L. Cord on that
front-wheel-drive vehicle that he tried to
develop, and he lost quite a bit of money in
that. Then the Second World War come on,
and old Roosevelt closed down the precious
metal mines because he didn’t figure they
were essential. So Bill took his trucks and
machinery and took on some contracts on
building roads for the government. His old
equipment wasn’t up to the job very well,
and there were breakdowns and one thing
and another. Building roads was clear out of
Bill’s line, anyway, and he lost a heck of a lot
of money there.
Eventually, the last years before Bill died,
he tried to open up a mine in Gold Hill there,
Silver City. It was an open pit mine that he
was opening up there. The road came down
on one side of the canyon, and he wanted
to mine that over there on the other side of
the canyon. So he went to all the expense of
changing the highway over to the other side.
It cost quite a bit of money, and then he didn’t
find the ore that he wanted to there. So by the
last years of Bill’s life, he was pretty pinched
for money, he had lost so much. Whereas the
first year or so that we were in Nevada, Bill
paid the second highest income tax in the
state of Nevada.
Did he have any special interest in the museum?
Can you recall what he hoped would occur to
help the museum develop?
Well, most of his interest was when we
built the mine—helping out with that and
getting the various machinery and other
things that we needed for that. He never
Judge Guild, Major Fleischmann and Other Trustees and Staff
did say much, but I think he was quite
satisfied with the job we did on the mine.
Bill furnished some of the equipment in the
mine exhibit, and he got some from other
mining outfits. They had done some open
pit mining in Virginia City, and when they
dug down with the shovels making the open
pit, they ran into old stopes. So we got a lot
of the old timber from there, especially. Like
that caved-in set there where the timber’s all
busted—he got that from up there. Bill was
instrumental in getting that for us. But as
far as the rest of the museum.. .oh, he would
always look and seemed satisfied with it, but
he never evinced any particular interest in
the biology or the archaeology or any of the
rest of it.
C. A. Wellsley was on the board, as well, wasn’t
he?
Yes, Wellsley was on the board when I first
went there. He was one of the first members
from the early days. Some claimed he was
a remittance man from England [laughter]
and that they kept him over here to get rid of
him. I don’t know whether that was true or
not. But he purchased the List ranch out here
and built the big house and developed that.
Then I don’t know what came up—whether
he went someplace else or whether he went
back to England...got married.
His name is prominently mentioned whenever
anybody talks about Carson City in that
period—late 1940s, early 1950s. He obviously
was a colorful local figure, and one that a great
number of people knew about. As a member of
the board of trustees, did he have any influence
on the development of the museum?
Not particularly that I know of. I saw the
man a few times, but had no contact with him
97
much. I’m afraid I can’t tell you much about
him.
A couple of later board members, whom I
understand did have some influence on the
direction the museum took, were Archie Pozzi,
Jr. and Tom Wilson.
Well, Tom, of course, was an advertising
man. He had the advertising deal in Reno
there for years, and then with someone else
he expanded to Las Vegas. But the way I
understand it, that didn’t do too well down
there, so Tom withdrew and came back to
Reno and just run his advertising business
there. He was always quite interested in the
museum, but Tom was a little bit frustrated
sometimes, I think. He was always interested
in getting the museum recognized more,
in Las Vegas—figured that it would do the
museum more good, you know, but it didn’t
seem to work out. I think that Tom probably
helped develop some interest at the Las Vegas
convention center so we could put exhibits in
there. And he was always interested in getting
more ties with the university.
Actually, Judge Guild never did want
anybody to get too much control of anything.
He wanted to keep all of it himself, I think.
Most of the time when changes were being
considered, he always thought, “Is that going
to affect my control of things here?” So, I think
Tom Wilson was quite frustrated sometimes
when trying to carry out these ideas that
he had. After the judge died and they made
Tom chairman of the museum board of
trustees, then he had a little more leeway on
it. But I don’t see that anything in particular
happened, because they were already in the
process of getting more Las Vegas people on
the board before I left there. And as far as
cooperating with the university, I don’t see
that that changed a great lot either.
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James W. Calhoun
As an advertising man, did Wilson do anything
about changing the image of the museum or
seeing to it that it was better represented and
more widely known throughout the state?
There were a couple of other people on the
board who were well known or perhaps had a
large role in the museum. Was Archie Pozzi, Jr.
an important figure on the board?
In a way, yes, because he was a legislator
and he had influence. Archie wasn’t on for very
long before he resigned. His being a native of
Carson City, of course, he was interested in
the museum as a tourist attraction. He had
that Pozzi Motor Company out there, and
then was a legislator.
Not in any advertising way, no.
Did he have any suggestions for changing the
operations of the museum?
No. His deal was mostly getting the
expansion of the museum to Las Vegas and
so forth. Of course, that just didn’t happen
through those years, because the legislators
weren’t interested in a museum down there,
and a lot of the people weren’t. They had their
historical society down there, and they were
against it. They were not in favor of a branch
of the museum there, because they figured it
would interfere with their domination of it, I
guess.
I told you about the judge introducing the
bill there to make a branch in Las Vegas, and
what happened to that. I don’t see where things
changed a great lot until the legislature finally
did get some interest in it, because there was
all of these museums and historical societies
coming to them for funds each session. To the
legislators it looked like kind of a duplication
of services that they were funding. It had
been suggested years and years ago that
everything be consolidated, but nothing was
ever done about it, until finally they did set up
the Department of Museums and Historical
Societies and put it under one head.
Tom Wilson was real interested in history
and wanted to carry it on. Of course, he had
the advertising approach to things a lot,
but except for the fiasco on appointing the
director, he did all right on everything. They
got Roscoe Wright and Florence Cahlan and
those people on the board, so he had a good
board to work with on all of it.
Was he able to get anything done in the
legislature for the museum?
Just how much influence he had on things,
I don’t know. I never did hear the judge say
anything about how much good Archie did. I
imagine that he did have some influence, but
I couldn’t tell you just how great it was.
What about Sessions “Buck” Wheeler’s
contributions?
Buck was on the board of both the
museum and the Fleischmann Foundation
for a while. He resigned from the museum
board because it seemed to be a conflict
of interest after he was established in the
foundation. Buck was mainly interested in
the Indians and the archaeology part of it,
and...oh, I guess you’d have to say Buck had
some fantasies in dreaming up these things,
but they weren’t always practical to get them
done. [laughter] Of course, he was always
interested in the archaeology and that part
of it, though.
Did he take part in any of the digs?
No, except to go out, like when we took
the board out to Winnemucca caves and up
Judge Guild, Major Fleischmann and Other Trustees and Staff
to Tom Layton’s Last Supper caves. But Buck
was a great friend of Peggy Wheat’s, so he
was interested in a lot of her work with the
Indians.
There really were very few members of
the board of trustees who were influential
or affected the way the museum developed
in any way. There were several good board
members who usually attended the meetings
pretty regular, but most of being on the board
was going along with what was taking place
and with the judge.
My understanding is that upon Major
Fleischmann’s death Julius Bergen became the
most prominent member of the foundation.
Of course, he was also on the museum board
of trustees.
Oh, yes. You might say he had charge of
the foundation, because he had handled the
major’s finances for so many years that he
knew it from one end to the other. I don’t
think the other folks that were appointed to
the foundation board had very much to do
with the actual investing of funds or anything
like that. I think Julius Bergen took care of
everything like that. The board members’
duties were to go through all the applications
and then finally decide on those that they
would find. Probably Julius had a lot to say
about how much, because he’d know how
much could be distributed.
Did he have a particular interest in the
museum?
Well, to the extent that it was a baby of the
major’s and he wanted to do everything that
he thought the major would like.
But you don’t know of any personal interest he
may have had in the progress of the museum?
99
No, not that I know of. He had enough
interest that he made the suggestion that they
had to have the elevator in that Guild wing,
and they donated the money for that.
Mr. Bergen had been Fleischmann’s
secretary for much of his life, looking after
all the investments and everything. He
took over the foundation when that started
operating, and he was the main one there.
All the rest of them on the board just helped
decide on allocating the money out from the
various requests that they got it, but Julius
Bergen did all the investing and keeping
track of the financial part of it that way. He
decided that he couldn’t be on the museum
board— that giving our board money would
be a conflict of interest with his foundation
responsibilities—so he resigned from our
board The judge would put in a request every
year for so much to supplement our budget.
Once, when we got the Judge Guild Hall built,
we didn’t have money enough to put in an
elevator. Mr. Bergen said that the building
was no good without the elevator there, and
so they put up $20,000 to put in an elevator.
That was his idea. We didn’t particularly ask
for it right then, but he was interested in the
museum, too, of course.
Memories of a Few of the Staff
When I started at the State Museum in
1948, they had 2 or 3 young people making
casts to put up, and they had Debs Longero
and George Smith working down in the
mine putting timber in. They were just hired
to construct the mine, but after I took over
there and we finished the mine, I kept George
Smith on as the building man. He did the
janitor work and everything. Then we had
a watchman on night shift and a secretary,
Liz Dayton. We also had old Fred Buick
there, who’d been with them ever since the
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James W. Calhoun
museum started and was sort of building
superintendent at that time. He worked at
taking care of the building.
Fred was getting real old and drinking
too much all the time. I had to do something
with him. One day the judge come up—he
was still on the bench then—and told me that
he had made me guardian of old Fred. Hadn’t
consulted me about it or anything. [laughter]
So I had Fred to take care of, and.... The board
decided to give Buick a little pension—I don’t
remember how much it was—and he had
some social security, so I had to take care
of him on that. I put him in a rest home out
there in Pleasant Valley. Cherry Guild was
running it then, but I couldn’t keep him there!
He’d go out and thumb a ride and come in to
Carson City.
There was the Toscano bar right across
from the museum where the bank is now. Old
Fred stayed there some...drunk all the time. I
didn’t want him to stay there. The Arlington
Hotel was on the corner where the Nugget
parking lot is, right across from the museum,
so I put him in the Arlington Hotel. Well, he
couldn’t control himself, and made messes
when he’d come in drunk that way, and so
pretty soon I got word I had to get him the
heck out of there. The chambermaids couldn’t
take care of him and clean up the.... So they
had what you call a “poor farm” out here at
Clear Creek, where Fuji Park is now. I took
him out there and installed him in that. When
I put him in there we lost the social security
for him and had to keep him there; it was the
only way we could handle him.
I don’t know why he drank so much. He
just got to be an alcoholic, I guess. I don’t
think he did it in the early days. He lived in
Elko then, where there was one of the first
experimental outfits where they tried to
extract gasoline from oil shale. Fred worked
for them doing that, as far as I know, until
they folded up. They didn’t make a go of it.
They couldn’t compete at the gasoline pump.
I don’t know when he came to Carson City. All
I know is he was at the museum when I came,
and had been with them since they started it.
*****
Dick Miller was director before I came
here. He lived out in Washoe Valley, where the
Foresta Institute is now. Once the legislature
was in session, and Judge Guild was holding
court over in Fallon. So Dick went down and
represented him at the legislature without
permission! [laughter] That was the judge’s
job, and the judge, as I have said, liked to have
control of everything! So Dick lost his job.
*****
Tony Green was a thin fellow, a little
taller than I was. He might have been around
6 feet, maybe. I don’t remember. He never
did seem very big to me, but he was a real
good-looking fellow—had no trouble getting
women. He stayed quite a bit out at the Flying
ME Ranch, where the divorcees came to get
their divorces. I never did learn how he had
come to be the director of the museum. He
was about 40 years old when he came here.
Were you aware of any particular skills that
Tony Green may have had that would have
made him suitable to be a director of a state
museum like that?
No.
You’ve already talked about the fact that he
was interested in having a zoo and not so
interested in having that mine exhibit. Did he
Judge Guild, Major Fleischmann and Other Trustees and Staff
have any other goals that you were aware of
for the museum?
No. Not that I know of. I never did talk
it over with him or discuss anything serious.
In fact, I was just working there building
cabinets, and it came as a surprise to me when
they asked me if I wanted to finish the mine.
Tony told them that I could, and so they put
it up to me, and I took it, just figuring that
that would probably be it. I had no idea that
I would go on there.
*****
It was because of Peg Wheat that we got on
to those Lake Winnemucca caves. She came
and reported them and told us about it so
that we could go out and make the deal there.
She and Susie and Willie from Schurz took
Thelma and I on a trip once down south into
Schurz, and they showed us various places
where the Indians had petroglyphs all over
the boulders. One boulder was quite a secret.
We had to say that we wouldn’t report it to
anybody or anything. They called it a Doctor
Pock. It was a prayer boulder—lava tufa with
cracks and holes in it. The Indians would go
there and put a little money in these cracks
and holes—mostly pennies—and say their
wishes or their prayers or something; and
there were new pennies there, indicating it
was still used.
Peg took us once to Walker Lake. We
took a little trip up above the road there,
where there was a bunch of boulders that
represented the Indian legends of before the
people came. The animals—coyote and one
thing and another—were supposed to be
their brothers, and this was supposed to be
a meeting of all the animals that the Indians
had this legend about.
101
Peg was real interested in all the
archaeology all the time, but she was only a
paid member of the museum staff as a parttimer once in a while when she’d go out on
one of the digs or something like that. On the
Tule Springs layout we hired her as cook; she
cooked for all the 4 months we were down
there on that. But that’s the only time that
she was paid. Otherwise, it was all volunteer
on her part. The museum bought her a tape
recorder and tapes, I think, and they gave her
the title of associate.
Was she the first person to do any archaeological
work associated with the museum?
Pretty much so, I would imagine,
because she had been with them before I
came there. She was from around Fallon;
she knew quite a bit about all of it because
of Hidden Cave and all that work out there.
She never did pay much attention to working
with the exhibits or anything like that. Peg
was interested mostly in the live Indians and
the field work.
When the ichthyosaur deposit was
discovered at Berlin, Nevada, Peg came to the
museum to get the museum interested in it.
Dr. Charles Camp, University of California
(Berkeley, I believe), was doing work there.
Phil Orr was here at that time, so Phil, Thelma,
my secretary Marge Hughes and I went out
to investigate. There had been the large Dixie
Valley earthquake the day before, and while
we were standing on the ichthyosaur head
that Dr. Camp had uncovered the earth shook
quite hard with an aftershock. I reported to
the judge and board what our taking over
would involve. They decided the museum
did not have the staff or funds to handle the
project. Peg and others went ahead, then,
enlisting the interest of legislators and had the
102
James W. Calhoun
project placed under the state parks, which I
believe was a more satisfactory solution.
*****
I don’t know just how Phil C. Orr got all
of his experience. His folks owned a farm up
in the Gallatin Valley in Montana, and I don’t
know where Phil took his early training. He
was mostly a paleontologist to begin with. It
was mainly after he got in the Santa Barbara
Museum that he got into archaeology, too.
And he did quite a bit of work around there on
various sites that were discovered, and then he
got interested in the Channel Islands—Santa
Rosa, particularly—and did a lot of work
there on those dwarf mammoths. The island
had been connected with the mainland at one
time, and the mammoths that had migrated
over from Asia across the Bering Land Bridge
had gone over on the island and then been
isolated when the seas rose after the glaciers
melted. With the lack of food, they became
dwarf size. The elephants out there were only
about 4 feet high. Of course, they became
extinct. Phil did an awful lot of excavation
out there, studying those dwarf mammoths,
and wrote some pamphlets on that.
Then we got Phil Orr interested in the
Lake Winnemucca caves, and he came up and
helped excavate those. He did a pretty good
job on it—not quite as scientific as some of
them do nowadays on the excavation, but he
gridded it out and kept track of the depths
and took pictures of where things were found
and made maps of the caves and just where
they were found, and everything like that. He
and 2 or 3 other fellows around had found on
some of their excavations what they claimed
were stones that had been worked by man,
where some of the archaeologists claimed
they were nothing but stones that had been
weatherworn. He and the others were hoping
for a 10,000 to 12,000-year date on them,
where Robert F. Heizer and all that bunch
were saying it couldn’t be over 4,000 years.
All these college people pooh-poohed Phil
and his group’s work, and I think that kind
of affected Phil some. One of the reasons
that he wouldn’t put out the publications
that I wanted was probably because he was
always so concerned that he needed more
information and wanted to study more.
Phil was never actually on the State
Museum staff. He was just on loan from the
Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History,
and they paid his wages all the time. Phil
was just in Nevada for the summer months
for those 3 years that we excavated out there.
That was all, except when he’d come up for
the Western Speleological deal with me. Phil
and I usually did all the field work on that,
as far as overseeing it and one thing and
another. The judge and Dr. Coggeshall and
all the rest of them were just board members,
and they didn’t go out any. We had 2 young
fellows hired that were doing all the cave
exploration in eastern Nevada, mapping all
those limestone caves. Phil would come up
and we would go up over to eastern Nevada
and see what the boys were doing.
Phil was very interested—with Wally
Broecker of the Lamont Observatory—in
carbon 14 dating the various levels of old
Lake Lahontan so that they would have more
an idea of the rise and fall of this lake through
the centuries. We went out a number of times,
taking samples that way. We got the Fish and
Game Commission to let us go over to Anaho
Island and sample from the top of the hill on
the island on down, on these layers. A n d
we went up above Lovelock and followed the
shorelines of the old lake clear back down
to Fallon, all along there, making a survey
to see if we could find any more caves like
Winnemucca and Lovelock, but we never did
Judge Guild, Major Fleischmann and Other Trustees and Staff
103
find anything but some small rock shelters
where a hunter stayed overnight or something
like that. That was about the extent of Phil’s
work up here.
Otherwise, once anything like that was
decided, it was up to Dick to take care of it,
hire the crew and oversee it. I would just go
out and visit the digs once in a while.
*****
Did he have any principal research objectives
that you were aware of? Was he interested in
certain parts of the state? Was he interested in
certain periods of time? Was he interested in
certain types of artifacts?
Phil Orr was succeeded by Richard Shutler, I
believe—succeeded in the sense that the next
archaeologist to come in was Shutler. Did you
hire Shutler, or did the board of trustees? Who
was responsible for that sort of thing?
I got permission from them to hire an
archaeologist. Of course, they didn’t know
anything about any of the archaeologists. They
went right along with me on hiring Dick—
took my word for it that he was all right. So
there was no difficulty that way.
Had you considered anybody else at that time,
or did you just decide that this was your man?
No, I didn’t even investigate anyone else
much. I knew a few of them around, but it
seemed to me that Dick would be the best.
He was getting started and would want to
develop himself, and he seemed to be quite
good at organizing things and developing
grants from the National Science Foundation
and so forth, which we needed. He seemed to
be the logical one, and he was. He developed
quite an ongoing program and had it going
pretty good here, except I couldn’t get money
enough for him. [laughter]
When he came in, did the 2 of you sit down and
discuss any strategy for the coming years? Did
you have an agenda, in a way, that you were
going to try to fulfill?
Only to organizing the department and
then deciding on what sites to excavate.
Well, he was interested in pushing the
accepted time of occupation by the Indians
here as far back as he could, of course, but that
wasn’t the overriding thing. The main thing
was to get these sites excavated and all the
information out of them so that publications
could be made from it. We didn’t particularly
make any big site survey first, because after
Dick came here there were so many sites that
needed attention that we went right to work
on those. There was plenty of sites to take up
our time, because excavation amounted to just
the summer months all the time here. After
people found out that we were doing the work
and needed it, then we started getting more
reports of sites.
Dick never was very interested much
in what Phil Orr had done, or being with
him at all or investigating, talking it over or
anything else. Phil only came up on Western
Speleological business, and so they never did
get together on any archaeology or anything.
As far as archaeology was concerned,
Dick Shutler was an important figure in the
development of the museum. And he could
have been quite influential here, I think, with
his ability to organize and get grants and one
thing and another. But I couldn’t keep him
here with the low salary I could pay him.
Then also there was the difficulty of his wife,
Mary Elizabeth Shutler. She had a degree in
anthropology, and she wanted to get on at
104
James W. Calhoun
the university and couldn’t make it. For some
reason she didn’t get on there, and they were a
little disappointed about that. Of course, she
wanted to leave here and go someplace where
she did have an opportunity. I think that was
another one of the things that contributed
to their leaving here. Dick got the job in
Hawaii, and they were both interested in the
South Sea Islands and prehistory there—the
migration to the islands, or how those islands
come to be inhabited. So they grabbed that
opportunity. Shutler’ s wife was kind of a
part-time museum associate while they were
here.
*****
Peter Herlan was working for a concrete
contractor here in town in the 1950s. I don’t
know how I got on to it, but I needed a driver
for that mobile unit, and I found out that Pete
had handled big equipment that way. So I
approached him on coming to the museum
and got him to take over the mobile unit. He
did a great job on that, taking it around to
the schools for the kids. Pete was one that’d
jump right in at the museum and help put in
the exhibits and do other things.
I found out that Pete had gone to the
University of Washington, where he received a
degree in biology. He even played in the Rose
Bowl one year, on their football team. So as I
developed a department of natural history, the
biology department, why, I put Pete in charge
of that, and he took over. He did a lot of the
gathering of specimens for the taxidermist
so we could build up the small mammals
and the birds. He was real good in the field
work that way. Then Pete got interested in
butterflies, because nobody else was doing
them, and he got to be known as one of the
best lepidopterists around. He got quite a
bit of national recognition, and even had a
crescent butterfly named after him. [Phyciodes
orseis herlani]
Traveling around the state with the
mobile unit, and then later on with gathering
specimens and hunting, I don’t think there’s
a road in this state that Pete didn’t know. He
climbed mountains and everything; he knew
probably more about the topography of this
state than anybody living around now. He was
interested in everything like that.
Pete had a big sense of humor. The only
thing is, he couldn’t keep away from the
drinking. It got so that, I guess, most of the
time after he got off shift, he was hitting the
bottle. He did quit smoking quite a few years
before he died, but he’d also evidently taken on
a lot of dust in that concrete work. He died of
lung cancer right at the time he retired from
the museum. He was going to have such a
great time on retirement, wandering around
the state and doing the things that he wanted
to....but he didn’t make it.
*****
Donald Tuohy had known Dick Shutler in
Arizona, I think, and he came here to work for
Dick on some of the digs. On the Falcon Hill
excavations, he was the dig foreman for
Dick. We tried to get Don to go back to college
and get his degree. Dick offered to help him all
he could with the University of Arizona, and I
promised him a job when he got through and
came back. So, Don went down to Arizona.
We figured he was going to school there, but
I think Don had some kind of a mental block
or something about college, because the next
thing we knew, we found out that he was
digging ditches in Arizona! [laughter] He
never did go there.
After Dick went to Hawaii, Don went
down there and worked for him for quite a
while. Then I had to get another archaeologist
Judge Guild, Major Fleischmann and Other Trustees and Staff
here. We had Charles Rozaire for a while,
but we couldn’t hold him here. He had more
opportunity in Los Angeles, and he went
back down there. It was pretty hard to get
any archaeologist on the salary we could pay.
I offered the job to Don, and Don accepted
and was going to come back. We had it all
set, and we had a date set that he was coming
back. I waited and I waited, and Don didn’t
come. Then I found out that they’d had a big
party for Don the night before he left, and he
fell over a bank [laughter], and he was...I don’t
know, his legs or something was buckered up.
don’t remember what it was, but he was in the
hospital. So, I had to wait for a while before
Don got here!
Well, did Mr. Tuohy have any particular
research interests that he wanted to follow once
he came to the museum?
No, he just carried on. He’s done a pretty
good job, I think, on getting things organized
and doing the excavation that needs to be
done. They haven’t done any great projects
too much any more. Oh, they had that one
with that bunch of skeletons they found out
at Fallon there, and they had a couple of small
ones up there around Lovelock, but most of it
has been archaeological surveys for the power
company and things like that. But Don has
organized all the things at the museum and
has been getting out some of the publications.
Don has done all right, but he’s just not a real
big pusher or anything like that.
*****
Thelma introduced me to Howard
Hickson. He and his wife were both artists,
and she knew them from the artists association
and shows around. I needed a curator of
exhibits. There was getting to be so much
105
work there that I needed somebody to take
over the exhibit department and manage it,
because I had so much administrative work to
do. Thelma suggested Howard. Well, Howard
and his wife were staying over at her father’s
ranch in the south end of Reno, and Howard
was selling insurance and doing contract art
work on the side, and he wasn’t interested in
it at all. He didn’t think so.
I said, “How about me giving you a
contract on making an exhibit or two, and
see how it comes out?” Well, all right, he’d do
that, and so he came over and worked on it
for a while. He got really enthusiastic about it,
and found out what it was all about, and that
he could put his talents to work there. So he
finally come to me and told me that he liked
it pretty well; he thought maybe he’d like the
job. I told him he didn’t have to worry;
I’d already put him on a salary. [laughter]
Howard stayed, and he was real good at
his job. He got right in and learned it, and
was able to get out and take care of things. I
sent him to Los Angeles to take care of all the
details on making these wax figures for the
Indians, and he took care of all of that and
got them up there and placed in the exhibit
and got the exhibit deal ready.
Tom Gallagher was on the board of the
museum, and he was also on the board of the
Elko museum. He and his brother had been
instrumental in starting up that museum
in Elko, and they needed a director of the
museum up there. It got so big that it was
more than just a volunteer layout, and they
were getting money from Elko. Everybody
up there was getting so enthusiastic about
the museum. So, they figured that they had to
expand and get a director in there to handle
the whole thing. They did get one fellow in
there that didn’t work out—one of these with
more talk than action, I guess. So, Gallagher
at one time wanted to know about whether
106
James W. Calhoun
Howard would be interested, and I said,
“Well, you’d better ask him.” They did, and
then Howard came to me wanting to know. I
said, “Well, I don’t want to lose you, Howard,
but you’ve got your future to think of, and I’d
think pretty seriously of it. I think you could
do an awful lot up there.” So he decided to
take it, and he really did a bang-up job on
organizing it and expanding it, and it received
national recognition. They finally got a lot of
the Fleischmann money when the foundation
disbanded, and they built the new addition
up there. He has a lot of modern ideas and
all that equipment for making videos and
photography. Howard has done real well; I’m
glad to see him do so well up there.
By the time you retired, the museum had a
fairly large staff.
Yes, there was 21 people on the staff when
I left.
Are there any others whom you think were
important in the development of the museum?
Well, I think Marian Clayton could be
mentioned, because she was my secretary
for so doggone many years! [laughter] She
married Guy Shipler, dean of the legislative
press corps. She had been working for the
state when I needed a secretary, and she came
up and hit it off with the judge. Actually, he
was the one that hired her. I didn’t know her
or anything, but she stayed on and was a very
good secretary to me, and very loyal to me
all the time. She would protect me from the
board if there was any need of it. [laughter]
Was there ever a need?
No, not in particular, but she helped me
out an awful lot and kept track of things so
that I knew everything. And then with the
hearing loss that I sustained at the last, and
couldn’t get a hearing aid that helped me, why,
she helped out an awful lot on the telephone.
Sometimes on those long distance calls, I’d
just have to call her and let her talk with
the person on the other end and get all the
information because I couldn’t hear them.
There were so many good people on the
staff over the years that I don’t think we can
mention them all.
11
The Decision to Retire and
a Succession of Directors
I decided to retire in 1973, partially
because of my age and health. Naturally, I was
getting older. I had been with the museum
for 24 years, and I was right up in years.
[laughter] And it was all administrative;
there wasn’t any joy to it like there was
when I first went there and was developing
the whole thing and getting right in and
working with the staff, you know, and going
out on digs and everything. Everything was
administrative, and I was tied to the desk
all the time. And all those years before,
we had had all that donated Fleischmann
Foundation money which the legislature
couldn’t touch. The board could do anything
they wanted with it, and the legislature had
no control over that. By the time I retired,
the foundation had quit funding us. We were
trying to get more out of the legislature,
and I was not doing too well at it. With the
privately donated money the board could do
as they wished, and we’d decide on projects
and we could go ahead and do it. But then
it got so that everything that you wanted
to do there, you had to consult 4 or 5 other
departments down in state government. If
you wanted to make a little change in the
museum building or do anything, you had
to go through the personnel department,
the buildings and grounds, the highway
department and everything like that, and
that was just too much for me to take.
[laughter]
Did you continue to do any work for the
museum after your retirement?
No. Some people have made a deal out of
being a consultant or something, but I never
did have anything more. The fact that they
run into that big mess with Tom Layton as
the director [laughter] really upset things for
quite a while there.
Did you play any role in the selection of
Layton as your successor?
No. I’d have to go back quite a ways
on that to tell you what I think happened.
When they set up the Desert Research
108
JamesW. Calhoun
Institute (DRI), they had a meeting over at
the university with our board and myself and
a bunch of the university people. They also
had several professors, scientists in. I think
one was from Chicago, and Bob Heizer from
Berkeley. Bob Heizer suggested that instead
of trying to get an experienced administrator
for DRI, that they get a young fellow out of
college, who would be gung-ho for making a
reputation for himself and really put it on the
map. For some reason or other, that seemed
to make a big impression with Tom Wilson.
About a year or so before I retired, we
had, with Harvard University, co-sponsored
Tom Layton to excavate caves in northern
Washoe County. He found evidence there
that the caves had been used by Indians that
had eaten horses. He surmised that they had
been used by Shoshone Mike—a renegade
Indian with a small group of half a dozen or
so that the whites were chasing that winter—
so he called it the Last Supper caves. We took
the board up there to visit that site and see
it, and they were quite impressed with Tom
and his digging and the archaeology there.
When I resigned, I think Tom Wilson
remembered this deal about putting in a
young fellow at DRI. He was impressed with
Tom Layton, so he got the board to hire him,
and Tom didn’t know a thing about museum
work or anything else. Tom Wilson was one
that wanted control pretty much of things.
Before I left there, he’d call me up at least
every day, and sometimes 2 or 3 times a day,
with suggestions on what to do.
He sounds like Judge Guild!
Well, the judge and I got along fine most
of the time, as long as I let him have the
honor. (laughter] So they put Tom Layton
on that.
Before I left there, on Tom’s dig the
first year there, we set up a deal—we were
going to make a documentary on a dig and
just how to do it. We had the photographer
take pictures of these trucks loaded up with
all the gear, the takeoff, and then he went
up there and stayed with the crews and
took pictures that summer to make this
documentary. The next year they were to
finish the documentary, and that was the year
after I had retired. Somehow they advertised
all over the country, I guess in the American
Association of Museums or something, that
they would conduct classes up there, and
students could learn how to take pictures
and how to make a documentary of digs.
Well, I don’t know just what happened at the
museum, but Tom Layton got a bone in his
neck. He wouldn’t let the photographer go
up there, and he didn’t show up.
A lot of these students had purchased
expensive cameras to come out here for the
course that year. There were students from
Florida and Chicago and many other places
around the country, and they were really
upset about the whole thing. They were
going down to the governor to raise heck,
and I think Pete Herlan had a lot to do to
get things calmed down up there some.
Tom Layton practically wrecked the
whole museum. Nobody knew what policy
he had or anything else. He couldn’t get
along with any of the crew, and he finally
got the crew so upset they were figuring on
going down and protesting in the governor’s
office. They finally had to let him go, the
crew was rebelling so much. And the way
he was acting—he even locked himself in
his office and wouldn’t let anybody in or talk
to anybody! [laughter] The state personnel
department even organized a psychiatric
class or something for the museum staff after
The Decision to Retire and a Succession of Directors
it was all over with, to get them back on base!
[laughter]
Peter Herlan was director after Layton.
When Pete was director, he would come
down to the house to consult with me and
be very upset. Evidently Tom Wilson as
chairman of the board of trustees was trying
to run the everyday operation of the museum
from his advertising office in Reno.
Following Herlan’s retirement, Tom
Wilson and the board of trustees got former
Secretary of State John Koontz to be the
interim director. So Johnny took over for a
few months or something; it wasn’t too long
a time. All this time I’d been working on it
year after year and getting maybe one new
person on the staff each legislature, with the
Fleischmann Foundation and other donated
monies paying all other salaries. When John
Koontz took over the legislature was in
session, and he went down to the legislature
and got them all on the state payroll! You
know, a big Democrat and so influential. He’d
been secretary of state for so many years,
and he had no trouble at all getting them all
on the state payroll. That must have been in
1975.
Koontz didn’t want the job permanently, did
he?
No. Not particularly. As soon as they
could find another good man they got Jack
Porterfrom back East someplace. He got
things organized real well. And then when
the legislature combined it all under the
Department of Museums and History, like
it is now, he took over that. He put Scott
Miller in as director of the museum. Then
he had some health problems—I don’t know
just what it was—and had to resign and go
back to wherever he had come from. And so
109
they put Scott in as head of the Department
of Museums and History.
Were you ever consulted during the process of
selecting someone to succeed you as director?
No. No.
Do you have any idea why?
Oh, I think Tom Wilson was glad to get
rid of me.
Had the 2 of you clashed?
Well, a time or two, yes. Oh, one time
Tom had raised heck about something. I
don’t even remember just what it was now,
but I wrote him quite a letter explaining it,
and he didn’t take too well to that. Then there
was a little feud in the air at one time where
the crew got a little upset, and Don Tuohy
and one or two others were a little outspoken
about the controversy. I don’t remember just
what all the problem was on it now. They
were upset with the board on some way that
they didn’t think they were getting what
was necessary for the museum. And Tom
Wilson wanted to fire these 3 people who
had been more vocal than anybody else on
it: Tuohy and Pam Crowell and somebody
else. [laughter] He wanted to fire them, and
I wouldn’t do it. The judge went along with
roe and wouldn’t do it. I got the whole thing
settled down and quieted down, and nothing
ever came of it. The judge didn’t insist on
firing them, and I wouldn’t fire them, so
Tom wasn’t very happy about that. That was
several years before my retirement.
It would seem from what you’ve been telling
me that the conflict that you had with Tom
110
JamesW. Calhoun
Wilson was a lengthy one and, apparently,
a pretty deep one as well. Did that have any
influence on your decision to retire?
Oh, to some extent, yes. It was evident
that Tom and I weren’t going to get along
too well after the judge died in 1971 and the
board of trustees had Tom as chairman.
But as long as the judge was alive, he would
protect you from Tom Wilson?
Well, Wilson couldn’t do very much.
He couldn’t say anything, because the judge
having started everything, the rest of the
board would always go along with the judge
on anything. There was no chance of any one
of them causing a lot of trouble or anything
like that, and they knew that! But for Tom
and I to work together, it just seemed like it
wasn’t going to be very productive.
Did Mr. Wilson have any coherent vision of
what the museum ought to be?
Oh, yes.
Did it vary from your own?
He had his own ideas on it. He was an
advertising man, and he thought that we
should be much more involved with Las
Vegas. He was kind of right there, but you
had to get the money in the legislature to do
it, and we hadn’t been able to do that. The
people in Las Vegas didn’t seem very crazy
about it anyway at that time.
There wasn’t any particular effort at
cooperation between the museum and the
University of Nevada in the 1950s. In fact,
the university didn’t have any great amount
of archaeological study going on at that
time, that early. Later on they did, and there
was cooperation, but not then. I remember
going over to the university a time or two for
some reason, to see somebody, but I couldn’t
tell you now what it was all about. We went
on our own pretty much, developing the
archaeological program. When Tom Wilson
became chairman of the board of trustees,
he thought we should go all out for all this
wonderful cooperation with the university
and so forth. I thought—and I know the
judge agreed—that if you get tangled up like
that, the university’s so big, with so many
more people and so much more money, that
they would just take over. You wouldn’t be
independent at all. In fact, that’s one of the
things that has happened to the Nevada State
Historical Society to some extent. You’ve got
several university professors that are doing
an awful lot of the running of the Historical
Society. We didn’t want that. We’d want to
cooperate with the university, but we didn’t
want to get so involved that they could take
over things. But Tom could never see that. He
was all imbued with the idea that it should
be such a wonderful cooperation between
the museum and the university.
Did he have any allies on the board of trustees?
No. Not that I know of. Didn’t see any of
them go along with him too strong.
What about in the university community?
To some extent. They would agree
with him on some of these things that he
proposed. The heads of departments and the
university president would agree with him
on cooperating, which was fine, of course.
It was all right for them. They meant what
they said: they would cooperate. And we
The Decision to Retire and a Succession of Directors
were willing to cooperate, but there’s a limit
to the cooperation.
*****
In reflecting back upon the years that you
were director of the museum, are there any
particular triumphs, any major achievements
that you would like to make note of?
Well, no. The whole thing was developing
the museum, and to me everything was
important—from the small things to the big
things that happened. If there was anything
at all, it would be where I was able to start
up these various departments and bring in
the research part of the museum, so that we
could be of service and be more educational
rather than just a museum with some static
exhibits. That was probably the thing that
I obtained the most satisfaction from. But
the whole thing has been such a wonderful
experience...developing it and getting it to
kind of conform to the way I started thinking
in the first place, especially not knowing
anything about museums. I hadn’t even been
in a museum until I went in there to work
on those cabinets!
What, had you avoided museums all of your
life? [laughter]
See, they didn’t have anything much
around Montana in the early days when I
was growing up, and after I got to bumming
around, why, I never did go to a museum.
I think the only one that I had ever visited
was in our short stay in San Francisco when
we went out to the De Young Museum. Of
course, after they made me a supervisor they
sent me to Santa Barbara, and I had a couple
of weeks down there with the preparators.
111
I saw what they were doing, and then
attending some museum conferences and
talking to the people, that’s where all the
ideas developed. You would talk to people
and get these ideas of what they were doing,
and then come back here and adapt them to
what we needed here or what we could do.
Well, the other side of this coin is frustrations
and setbacks and so forth. Were there any
that you can recall in particular that would
be more frustrating than anything else?
Well, I suppose there was quite a few.
One of the worst ones was not being able
to get Phil Orr to do any publications on
the Winnemucca caves. We missed out
on some publicity there on an old date.
Then Dick Shutler, after he had done that
excavation on Falcon Hill, resigned and went
to Hawaii. I never could get him to put out
his publication, and that’s one of the things
that Torn Wilson was always giving me hell
about. Shutler was such a favorite of mine to
hire, and then I couldn’t get this publication
out of him that Tom Wilson wanted to see so
bad on all that work at Falcon Hill. It never
did get published until about a year or so
ago. Don Tuohy got an archaeologist from
the DRI to study all the material and make
the publication. [The Archaeology of Falcon
Hill, Winnemucca Lake, Washoe County,
Nevada, by Eugene Hattori. Nevada State
Museum Anthropological Papers No. 18,
March 1982.] It finally got out, but I think
that’s after Torn Wilson died. Those are 2
big frustrations that I had, just getting those
fellows to put out the publications on all the
work we did and the money we spent.
Also, better salaries for the staff would
have made a big difference in what we could
have done, I think, and in hiring people and
112
JamesW. Calhoun
keeping them there. It would have taken
quite a load off of my mind to be able to
hire good people and keep them there. Quite
a few times I hired good people, but we
couldn’t keep them! Dick Shutler, of course,
but Pete Herlan was outstanding, too. You
couldn’t beat Pete for getting things done,
and all he did, going around the state. I think
he knew more about this state all over than
anybody. Pete drank too much, and that’s
what finally got him, but he was a wonderful
guy to have as a museum staffer.
Looking back on the 24 years that I
was director, I doubt I would do anything
differently. Most everything was decided
day to day as we went along. Each was a job,
and we did the job, and that was it. There
wasn’t any 5-year plan or anything like that.
[laughter] I think it was more interesting
that way, doing what we could with what we
had.
Photographs
Judge Clark J. Guild (r) and James Calhoun in Guild’s
Judge Clark
J. Guild
(r) and
James founded
Calhoun inthe
Guild’s
Museum
Museum
office.
Judge
Guild
Museum
inoffice.
1939.
Judge Guild founded the Museum in 1939.
114
James W. Calhoun
Judge Clark J. Guild (r) and James Calhoun in Guild’s
Museum office. Judge Guild founded the Museum in 1939.
Major Max C. Fleischmann,
Major Max C. Fleischmann, principal benefactor of
principal benefactor of the Nevada
Nevada State
Statethe
Museum,
ca. Museum,
1950. ca. 1950.
Photographs
115
Measuring a prehistoric basket at Lake Winnemucca’s Chimney Cave
site, 1954. l to r: Ernie Hovard, Phil Orr, James Calhoun.
Measuring
basket
Lake Winnemucca’s
Chimney
Measuringa aprehistoric
prehistoric basket
at Lakeat
Winnemucca’s
Chimney Cave
site, 1954.Cave
site, 1954. l tol tor:
Ernie
Hovard,
Phil
Orr,
James
Calhoun.
r: Ernie Hovard, Phil Orr, James Calhoun.
The Museum’s
mobile
unitvisits
visits Reno
High
School,
ca. 1955.ca. 1955.
The Museum’s
mobile
unit
Reno
High
School,
The Museum’s mobile unit visits Reno High School, ca. 1955.
116
James W. Calhoun
Thelma Calhoun was for years the Museum’s only docent. Here she
paints a replica of the state seal on a Museum float for Nevada Day,
1966.
Thelma
Calhoun
for the
years
the only
Museum’s
docent.
Here she
Thelma Calhoun
waswas
for years
Museum’s
docent. only
Here she
paints a replica
of the state
paints
replicafloat
of for
the
state
a Museum
float
for Nevada
Day,
seal onaa Museum
Nevada
Day,seal
1966.on
Photograph
courtesy
of James
W. Calhoun
1966.
Drawing
of the
W.Calhoun
Calhoun
Annex
toState
theMuseum--Hewitt
State Museum--Hewitt
C. Wells,
Drawing
of theJames
James W.
Annex
to the
C. Wells, architect.
architect.
Drawing of the James W. Calhoun Annex to the State Museum--Hewitt C. Wells,
All photographs courtesy of the Nevada State Museum, unless otherwise sspecified.
architect.
Appendix:
The Truman-Orr Foundation
The Truman-Orr Foundation
(Western Speleological Institute)
by Thelma Calhoun
T he Tr u man - O r r Fou nd at i on , formerly the Western Speleological Institute,
was established as a Nevada corporation for
study and field work in the earth sciences in
1953. The purpose for its establishment was
initially to fund internship grants to museums
to enable them to employ university students
seeking degrees in the earth sciences and
museology.
Selected students would be employed
by the museum during summer vacation,
semester breaks, etc., and gain practical
experience in cataloging collections,
preservation of artifacts, field work, and
related activities consistent with their studies.
Students applying for internships would
be interviewed by Foundation Trustees,
with the participation of the curator of the
particular museum department involved.
The grant would be awarded to the
museum for payment of salary and necessary
increments to the selected student or students.
Such extra-curricular experience would
very likely earn the student additional college
credit upon arrangement with the University.
To insure some flexibility in the actions
of the Board of Trustees, Section 11(a) of
the Truman-Orr Foundation Articles of
Incorporation outlining Purposes states: “to
finance: studies, cataloging, and publishing
of information concerning the earth sciences,
including, but not limited to, geology,
museology, archaeology, anthropology,
paleontology, speleology, and related
sciences.”
Members of the original Board of
Trustees included Judge Clark J. Guild,
founder of the Nevada State Museum; Max C.
and Sarah Fleischmann; James W. Calhoun,
Director of the museum; Jay Bergen of
the Fleischmann Foundation; Phil C. Orr,
Curator of Archaeology for the Santa Barbara
Museum of Natural History; and Mr. 0. H.
118
James W. Calhoun
Truman of Hollywood whose philanthropy
and interest provided the funding.
Its activities have included two years of
exploration, mapping and development of
Lehman and the many surrounding limestone
caves in White Pine County, Nevada.
Archaeology, geology, geography, and
paleontology of Santa Rosa, one of the
Channel Islands off Santa Barbara, California,
was an on-going project for fourteen years.
It involved the dwarf mammoth (in situ 37
feet below the surface in elephant bearing
horizons), as well as human bones with a
radio-carbon date of 10,400 + 2000 years BP,
one of the oldest datings for human bones in
America (as of 1960)
Studies with submarine soundings of
topography off Santa Rosa were made with
the use of Velero IV, research ship belonging
to the Allan Hancock Foundation of USC.
Cave sites and sea stands were studied by
visual exploration and aerial photography as
well as wave cut platforms off the Channel
Islands extending to the Continental Shelf.
Similar studies were conducted on ancient
Lake Lahontan in Nevada.
Surveys were also conducted from La Paz
up the California coast enabling recordings of
53 unreported sites and villages occupied by
ancient man.
All these, plus other activities, were
accomplished under the auspices of the WSI,
the Nevada State Museum, the Santa Barbara
Museum of Natural History, the Lamont
Laboratories, New York, the Wenner-Gren
Foundation for Archaeological Research, and
many other organizations.
Following the death or resignation of the
original Trustees, Mr. Orr was responsible for
the conduct of any work done, but due to his
failing health, organization has been inactive
for several years.
The remaining Trustees acted recently
to change the name of the WSI to TrumanOrr Foundation to honor the two men most
concerned. Mr. 0. H. Truman for his interest
and the original funding, and Mr. Phil Orr
for his many years of dedication in directing
the research. The original stated purpose,
“to further research and study in the earth
sciences” remains unchanged.
The current Board of Trustees are: J.
W. Calhoun, President; Thelma Calhoun,
Secretary-Treasurer; Don Carlson, Western
Nevada Community College member; Bob
Thomas, Assemblyman member; and Phil C.
Orr, member.
March, 1987
Original Index:
For Reference Only
In order to standardize the design of all UNOHP transcripts for the online database, they have
been reformatted, a process that was completed in early 2012. This document may therefore differ
in appearance and pagination from earlier printed versions. Rather than compile entirely new
indexes for each volume, the UNOHP has made each transcript fully searchable electronically. If
a previous version of this volume existed, its original index has been appended to this document
for reference only. A link to the entire catalog can be found online at http://oralhistory.unr.edu/.
120
James W. Calhoun
A
C
Adams, Eva,153-154
Alaska, 30-32
Anaho Island (Pyramid Lake),
115-116, 201
Antunovich, Andy, 57
Archaeology: archaeology/
anthropology department,
Nevada State Museum, 107,
108, 120-122, 124, 128, 130,
198-199, 202-204, 216-217;
Falcon Hill, 130, 135, 205;
Lost City, 116-119; petroglyphs, 197-198; pothunting,
98-99, 117-118, 119, 135136, 139-140; Pyramid Lake,
139-140; Tule Springs, 121,
132-135; vandalism, 98-99;
Cahlan, Florence, 162
Calhoun, James (grandfather),
1
Calhoun, Jimmy (son), 59, 6768, 75
Calhoun, Margaret (nee Hickey:
mother), 1, 2, 3, 4
Calhoun, Patricia
Winnemucca Lake caves, 98-
104, 120, 152-153, 197, 200
Atwater, Adrian and Jane, 65
B
Beatty, Clara,
Bergen, Juliu
193-194
FO
RR
E
F
E
2,
o ewich, Nancy, 96
Bray, Mildred, 67
Broderick, Ella, 64
Broderick's bar (Carson City,
Nevada), 64, 170
Broecker, Wallace "Wally",
103, 115, 201
Buick, Fred, 195-196
Bureau of Land Management
(BLM), 99
Byrne, Alice, 54
Byrne, John, 54, 57-58
Byrne family (Virginia City,
Nevada), 54
I~atty'l
(daughter), 50, 68, 87
Calhoun, Sara (nee Powell:
grandmother), 1
Calhoun, Thelma (nee Davis:
wife), 35-36, 37-38,
. , 45,
53, 55, 61-62, 63
,67,
68-70, 72, 73
, 86,
99-102, 11 , 118,
207
N
E
R
O
E
C
Y
L
N
family,
Carson City, Nevada, 61; bars,
64, 170, 195; city politics,
69-70; and Depression, 63;
fires, 65; floods, 65;
hotels, 65, 195; housing,
62-63, 66; population, 63;
postwar house building boom,
66; social life, 64, 71-72
Carson City Council, 69
Carson City Supervisors, 70
Clayton, Marian, 209
Coggeshall, Arthur, 99, 105,
184-185, 201
D
Datin, Richard, 173
Davis, Grant, 37, 39, 66
Davis, Mary, 63, 66, 67
Original Index: For Reference Only
Davis (Grant) family
City, Nevada), 66
Depression (U.S.), 3,
63
Doe, Milton and Ruth,
Donovan, William, 83,
187-188
(Carson
28, 32,
38
86,
E
Education, 20; in Philipsburg,
Montana, 4-5, 6
Education, Department of
(Carson City, Nevada), 67
Employment (James Calhoun,
1903-1947), 22-34, 36-37,
39-43; carpenter work, 19,
60; construction work, 53,
59-60, 66; Forest Service,
U.S" 9, 26-28; Great
Northern tunnel, 29-30;
house building, 66; house
salvaging, 50-51, 52; mine
salvaging, 57-58;
23-24, 25-26, 28,
40-42, 54, 57-59' ototiller
manufacturin
0, 65-66'
salm?n fjP ,n g , 30-32' sawmill g, 32, shi , rd work,
3
0
FO
E
R
R
R
E
F
F
Falcon Hill (Washoe County,
Nevada). See Archaeology
Fink and Mahoney mining claim,
(Jumbo district, Washoe
County, Nevada), 54, 59
Fishing, commercial, 30-32
Fleischmann, Major Max C., 76,
78, 79, 80-84, 85, 88, 89,
91, 94-95, 99, 127, 148,
149, 178, 181-186
Fleischmann, Sarah, 186
Fleischmann Foundation, 95,
112-113, 120, 124, 126,
137-138, 139, 186, 193-194,
208, 210, 214
Forest Service, U.S., 9, 26-28
121
G
Gallagher, Tom, 208
Gaming industry, 170-171
Gould, Jay, 133, 134
Graves, Richard "Dick," 170
Green, J. E. "Tony," 75, 7781, 196-197
Guild, Judge Clark J., 76, 79,
80, 81, 83, 84, 88, 90, 91,
95, 104-105, 106-107, 109110, 111, 112-114, 117, 118,
119, 125, 127, 129, 136-137,
153-154, 162, 164, 166,
170, 171, 173, 175, 1 -181,
182, 183, 185, 19 , 191,
96, 209,
193, 194, 195
212, 215,217
EN
O
E
C
Y
L
N
, Jack, 23, 35
rrington, Mark Raymond, 117
Hawkins, Katherine Mackay, 127
Heizer, Robert F., 104, 211
Herlan, Peter, I l l , 115, 128,
138, 204-205, 213, 220
Hickey, ~im, 8, 23
Hickey, John, 8, 23, 28
Hickey, Tom, 23
Hickey (James) family
(Philipsburg, Montana), 2
Hickey ranch (Philipsburg,
Montana), 7-8
Hickson, Howard, 159, 207-208
Highway Department, Nevada
state, 129
Hoboing, 21-22
Holley, Frederick "Fred," 94,
114-115, 149, 150
Hot Springs (Carson City,
Nevada), 64
Hughes, Howard, 59
I
Ichthyosaur fossils, 199
Idaho-Maryland Mining Company
(Grass Valley, California),
40-42
Indart, Pete, 64
Isbell Construction Company,
53, 59-60
122
James W. Calhoun
J
Jacobsen, Carl, 84, 113-114,
138, 179
Johnson, Ken, 64
Jumbo mining district (Washoe
County, Nevada), 58-59
K
Kendall, Zeb, 49-50, 54
Koontz, John, 138, 213-214
Kroger, Betty (nee Davis), 43,
61, 62, 66-67
Kroger, Walter, 43-44, 66, 67
Kroger family (Carson City,
Nevada), 62, 66-67
McDonald, George "Pinto," 30,
31-32, 33-34
Melody Lane (Carson City,
Nevada), 64
Metz car, 11-12
Miller, Dick, 196
Miller, Scott, 214
Mills, Mrs., 127
Mines and mining, 45-46, 57;
in California, 40-42; in
Montana, 1-2, 3, 7, 23-26,
28, 29, 36-37; in Virginia
City, Nevada, 49, 54, 57-59
Moorlight Mining Company
(Montana), 23-26
L
Labor relations, 24
Lahontan, Lake (prehistoric).
See Nevada State Museum
Laxalt, Paul, 64
Layton, Tom, 211-213
Lazarri, Bronco, ~ , 51-52
Le Blanc, "B g< " 50-51, ~
Legislat'
Counsel ~~au
~' on CitY~~da), 67,
~
F
R
R
O
E
F
E
g~Slat;>l,~ evada
state,
63- 4r, 65, 90, 118-119,
2-123, 124, 136, lSI,
165-166, 171-173, 178, 214
Lehman Caves (White Pine
County, Nevada), 73-74
Libby, Willard F., 133, 134
Long, Walter, 92-93
Longero, Debs, 82, 86-87, 94,
194-195
Lost City (Clark County,
Nevada). See Archaeology
Lost City Museum (Overton,
Nevada), 117, 118
M
Martinez, Tim, 64
McCarren, Patrick A., 151-153,
167
McCarren, Sister Margaret, 152
N
E
R
Ne
O
E
C
Y
L
N
a Historical Society,
109-110, 141, 143, 145-146,
ISS, 162, 217
Nevada State Museum (Carson
City, Nevada): accreditation, 173-175; archaeological research (see
Archaeology); archaeology/
anthropology department,
107, 108, 120-122, 124, 128,
130, 198-199, 202-204, 216217; benefactors, 76, 78-79,
80-81, 83-84, 87, 89, 95,
96-97, 103, 104-105, 108,
112-114, 120, 124, 126, 127,
132, 137, 138-139, 143-145,
148, 149-150, 152-153, 154155, 156, 159, 170-171, 178179, 181-186, 193-194, 210,
214, 221; biology department, 107, 108, 111, 204205; Bird Room, 149-150;
board of trustees, 88, 106,
112-114, 118-119, 120, 123,
125, 131, 136-138, 162-163,
164, 169, 179-180, 187-194;
Calhoun Annex, 127, 129,
166; coin press no. 5, 93,
153-156; Dat-so-la-lee
baskets, 146-147; dioramas,
83, 149-150; docents, 159,
169-170; Falcon Hill (see
Original Index: For Reference Only
Archaeology}; finances and
staffing problems, 136-139,
178-179, 181, 210; general
curator, 136-137; geology
department, 107; Guild
Annex, 124-126, 127, 128,
129; Gun Room, 75-76, 148149; Historical Room, 95-96,
143-146; Indian gallery,
128, 159, 208; Lake Lahontan
(prehistoric), 103, 130,
201; Las Vegas branch, 119,
161-164, 190-191, 216; Lost
City (see Archaeology);
Mammal Room, 149-150; mine
exhibit, 80-88, 90-93, 176,
182-183, 188; mineral exhibit, 107-108; Mint Room,
153-156; mobile unit, 73,
110-112, 125, 204-205; moon
rock, 157; operational
philosophy, 106-110, 141146, 166-170, 181, 210, 218;
ornithology and mamma logy
department, 114-115, 127;
Paleontology Room, 150·
portable exhibits
ses},
167-168; publi
ions, 103
104, 105,
-123, 134
219; P amid Lake
eology};
aries,
Ar
8-89, 136- 9, 214, 219;
Senato
atrick McCarran
Me rial Room (proposed),
51-153; space shortages/
expansion, 123-130, 164-166;
state seal, 156-157; summer
teaching program, 169; taxidermy, 94, 114; Tule Springs
(see Archaeology); U.S.S.
Nevada silver, 141-142, 157159; V & T rolling stock,
acquisition of, 171-173 (see
also Nevada State Railroad
Museum); V & T Room, 147148; vandalism, 92-93, 160161; Winnemucca Lake caves
(see Archaeology); zoo,
77-79
Nevada State Planning Board,
125-126
Nevada State Railroad Museum,
171-173
Nugget, Carson City, 170-171
FO
E
R
R
R
E
F
123
o
Old Corner Bar (Carson City,
Nevada), 64, 170
Orr, Mildred, 99-100
Orr, Phil C" 91, 98, 99-100,
102-105, 108, 115, 120-121,
122, 135, 184-185, 199-201,
203, 219
P
Paiute Indians, 102-103, 139
Peccole, William, 112
Perkins, R. F. "Chick
118, 119
EO
Y
L
N
n, 112
, 182
, 13-14, 68-71
Po er, Jack, 173, 214
ozzi, Archie, 191-192
Preston, Ralph, 127
Pueblo Grande de Nevada.
See Archaeology: Lost City
Pyramid Lake (Nevada).
See Archaeology
C
N
E
R
Ranching (Philipsburg,
Montana), 8, 18, 19, 23, 25
Religion, I, 14-15; Catholicism, 54; Mormonism, 1
Russell, Marge, 96-97
S
Sabels, Bruno, 130-131
St. ~Iary's in the Mountains
church (Virginia City,
Nevada), 47-48, 54
Salzman, George, 57
Santa Barbara Museum of
Natural History (California), 85, 98, 105, 200-201
Seaman Manufacturing Company,
60, 65-66
Senator Club (Carson City,
Nevada), 64
124
James W. Calhoun
Sexsmith family (Virginia
City, Nevada), 53
Shaughnessy, Jack, 60, 61, 65
Shaughnessy, Mike, III
Shinners, William, 130
Ship Bar, (Carson City,
Nevada), 64
Shipler, Guy, 107, 209
Shutler, Mary Elizabeth, 203204
Shutler, Richard "Dick," 108,
113, 116, 119, 120-122, 128,
130-131, 132, 133, 134, 135,
138-139, 201-204, 205-206,
219
Smith, Father Robert, 54-55
Smith, George, 94, 96, 177,
194-195
Smith, Herschel, 132, 133, 134
Sports and leisure, 7, 8-9,
10-11, 28-29, 53, 65, 72-74
Stewart, Bill, 69, 160
T
F
R
R
O
E
F
E
County,
See Archaeology
105, 140, 205-207,
U
University of Nevada, 216-217
V
Virginia City, Nevada, 47-60;
fires, 56; social life, 53,
55, 56, 60; tourism, 49,
55-56, 57; water supply, 56;
World War II, effects of,
49, 55-56
Virginia and Truckee (V & T)
Railroad, 57, 66; roundhouse, 60
W
Waters, Dick and Edith, 64
Wells, Joe, 112, 162
Wellsley, C. A., 189
Western Speleological Institute (Society), 73-74, 104105, 184-185. See also
Truman-Orr Foundation;
Appendix
Wheat, Margaret M. "Peg," 98,
192, 197-199
Wheeler, Sessions "Buck," 159,
192
Wier, Jeanne, 143
Wilson, George, 107
Wilson, Tom, 11
191, 211219
N
E
R
O
E
C
Y
L
N
55-56; end
61-62;
40,